


Borrowed Hearts

by alex_caligari



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Bodyswap, Feelings, Lance Tells Bad Jokes, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-23
Updated: 2018-09-13
Packaged: 2019-07-01 08:53:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 24,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15770757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alex_caligari/pseuds/alex_caligari
Summary: “Well, sort of," Coran said. "All the procedural memory is still there. You didn’t forget how to walk or speak. Those parts of you remain in the original brain. But the druranu copies all the other aspects of higher consciousness, like memories and decision-making.”Pidge rubbed her temples. “It’s as if our brains are a memory stick that’s had all the old data put into an encrypted folder we can’t access, and new processing data has been added that our brains are using instead?”Coran beamed. "Exactly!"





	1. Chapter 1

“Are you telling me there are literal body-swap aliens out there?” Lance gaped at Coran. “That we can meet?”

Coran twirled his moustache, which meant he was planning to give a long explanation. Or a long personal story. Or perhaps an idiom that none of them had heard before. His moustache twirling meant a lot of things. “Druranus are not a sentient species, so meeting them would be like meeting an eakon or a klussybae. And yes, I suppose you could call the effect they have on people ‘body swapping.’”

“Can we go see them right now?” Lance clasped his hands in front of him like a child asking for a new toy.

Beside him, Hunk took a step to the side. “This won’t be like when we met those alien mermaids, is it? I don’t want to get dragged into another one of your fetishes.”

Lance whirled on Hunk. “It’s not a—it’s an interest! I am interested in new forms of life. Like we all are, right, Pidge?”

“It sounds weird and gross,” she said while cleaning her glasses on her shirt. “But I have to admit, it would be fascinating to see the biological systems that can do that.”

Lance turned back to Coran. “There, that’s three votes to go see them.”

“I didn’t actually vote,” Hunk said.

Coran continued tugging at his moustache, considering them. There was a fifty/fifty chance he would either encourage their stupid whims or shut them down and make them do something ‘character building’ instead. Like training.

“We are headed in the general direction of their planet,” he said at last. “There’s no sentient species there at all, but it doesn’t mean it couldn’t be used as a Galra base. We could do a little reconnaissance to make sure.”

Lance whooped. “I’ll go tell Keith and Shiro. Call me when we arrive!” He bolted for the doors of the bridge and caught Hunk saying, “I got a bad feeling about this.”

&&&

Allura wasn’t as enthusiastic about the stopover as the others were, but conceded that an easy mission like this would be good for morale. She went over their strategy before they headed out.

“Pidge and Hunk, you’ll follow this river east to the plateau.” She pointed out the spot on the hologram map. “It’s a logical place to build a base. Keith and Lance—”

“Man, I’m always with Keith. When can I team up with Hunk? Or Shiro?” Lance lifted his hands as if he was holding his rifle. “Two handsome, badass paladin warriors taking on the worst the universe has to offer.”

Allura gave him a flat look. “I’ve put you in these teams because of your skill sets and weapons specialities. A team with both close-combat—” She pointed to Keith and Pidge, then to Lance and Hunk. “—and long-range weapons allows you to watch each other’s backs. Shiro will do aerial recon with the Black Lion and serve as air support if needed. Coran and I will do scans of the planet to see if there are any resources the Galra might find useful.”

“Sounds good, Princess,” Shiro said from beside Lance.

“Suck-up,” Lance muttered. Shiro grinned and elbowed him.

The Castle of Lions touched down next to a forest that stretched towards the horizon. A silver river cut through it, pouring down from steep, bronze-coloured cliffs jutting out of the ground. Lance breathed in the air—humid and cool, with the familiar scent of rot that came from all forests—before putting on his helmet and waving Hunk and Pidge off. The two of them followed the river downstream on their speeders while Lance and Keith headed up into the cliffs. Lance could see the appeal for the Galra. The view alone would make a lovely setting for a cabin even if you weren’t an empirical war culture.

Lance looked up at the sonic boom caused by the Black Lion arcing through the sky. “Do you ever realize how cool our lives are?” he asked Keith though the helmet comm. Keith was leading, having more experience with navigating land-based vehicles than Lance did. Although Lance made sure to never let him forget that Keith once drove them all off a cliff without hesitation.

“Is this really the time?” Keith said.

“You gotta relax, my man,” Lance said. He followed Keith around a hairpin turn that likely wasn’t at all necessary. “Don’t you have fun when we’re out on missions? Or ever?”

Keith’s sigh filled the comm with static. “I have fun.”

“Tearing robots apart with your teeth doesn’t count. I mean the kind of stuff that Hunk and Pidge and I used to do back home. Play pranks, sneak out, things like that.”

“You want me to sneak out of the castleship,” Keith said in a monotone.

“Well, no—hey!” Lance ducked under a branch that almost swept him off the speeder. “But you could come hang out with us once in a while. Might loosen that stick up your ass.”

Keith started to protest when Hunk’s voice interrupted him over the comms.

“Hey guys? I think we found one of those druranus Coran mentioned.”

“Really?” Lance said. “How do you know?”

Pidge cut in. “Because Coran showed us an image while you were fanboying to Keith and Shiro.”

“It looks like a football had sex with a vacuum,” added Hunk. “And it’s sitting on my speeder.”

“Cool!” said Lance.

“Are you alright?” Keith asked, slowing to a stop. Lance pulled up beside him, mindful of the drop on their right.

“Yeah, I’m fine. Pidge, are you seeing this?”

“Hunk, don’t touch it.”

“It’s on my speeder, I have to touch it. Unless you want it riding shotgun— _holy shit!_ ”

“Hunk, get down!” There was a crash and a burst of static. Then nothing.

Lance and Keith looked at each other, then cranked their speeders around. “Pidge, do you copy?” Keith said as he raced back along the cliff. “We’re headed for your position. Repeat, do you copy?”

No response other than a quiet groan.

Lance’s heart was in his throat as they approached Pidge and Hunk’s last known position. _Please let them be okay, please let them be okay, please, please, please._

They skidded to a halt in a clearing by the river. Lance’s gaze kept being drawn to the white rapids that pelted the rocks.

Keith was already walking towards the tree line. “Pidge! Hunk! Where are you? Shiro, something happened down here. I don’t know, we’re trying to figure it out.”

The trees beside them rustled. Lance automatically brought up his bayard, feeling the reassuring weight of the rifle appear in his hands. From the corner of his eye, he saw Keith activate his sword. “I go right, you take left,” Keith muttered.

“Your left or my left?”

“We’re facing the same—just be ready.”

Lance grinned at Keith’s irritation even as he settled into a shooting stance.

Something short, green, and loud burst from the trees. “She’s so small!” cried a familiar voice as it threw itself at Lance.

“Pidge? What the—”

“How does she not break?” Pidge sobbed into Lance’s chest.

“Are you okay?” Keith asked.

“He’s fine,” said another voice. Hunk stepped out into the meadow, albeit much more slowly and carefully than Pidge.

“What happened?” Keith said at the same time Lance said, “‘He?’”

Hunk sighed and touched his nose in a weirdly familiar gesture. It was as if...

As if he was trying to push his glasses up. “No way,” Lance breathed.

“Lance?” Keith said, looking ever more frustrated that no one was answering him.

Lance pushed back the short paladin crying into his armour. “Hunk?”

She—he?—looked up. “I didn’t mean to touch it. Pidge warned me, but it looked so small and squishy that I thought—”

‘Hunk’ walked up to them, placing each foot carefully. “He poked the druranu, and it blasted us in self-defence.”

Keith had finally caught on. “You and Hunk actually switched bodies?” He pointed to Pidge’s body. “Hunk’s in there?”

“Unfortunately,” Pidge said. Now that he was listening for it, Lance could hear Pidge’s dry tones wrapped in Hunk’s voice. Pidge glared down at herself. “And until we get this sorted out, we will have some _very_ strict ground rules about how you ride around in there.”

Hunk-as-Pidge looked terrified.

“We need to get you both back to the castleship,” Keith said. He turned away to call Shiro to pick them up.

“I can drive myself, you know,” Pidge muttered.

Lance glanced between his two friends. Hunk was peering through Pidge’s glasses, then lifting them up and squinting while Pidge was flexing her hand and staring at it. “This will be hard to explain.”

Pidge snorted. “Try living it.”

Keith came back to them. “The Black Lion will set down here. Pidge, Hunk—” He looked from Pidge’s body to Hunk’s, then corrected himself. “Er, Hunk, Pidge, we’ll pick up your speeders. Are they nearby?”

“Back through there.” Pidge pointed over her shoulder. “We can drive ourselves back,” she said to Keith. “It’s not that far.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Keith said.

“Why?” Pidge crossed her arms. “We’re not injured.”

Keith rolled his eyes at her petulance. “Pidge, try to hit me in the face.”

“What?”

“Just try it.”

Pidge narrowed her eyes as he stood with his arms crossed utterly unconcerned. Lance and Hunk backed away a few steps as Pidge drew back a fist.

“Should we be letting this happen?” Hunk whispered.

“He knows what he’s doing,” Lance replied. “I think.”

Pidge wound up and threw an uppercut towards Keith, and Lance understood what Keith was showing. That punch would have landed if Pidge had been at her normal height, but being in Hunk’s body threw her centre of gravity and balance off. Keith side-stepped the punch, pulling Pidge’s arm past him so she went flying into the grass.

She whirled around to glare at him, but he was already offering her a hand up. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Your reflexes are all thrown off from what you’re used to. I think it would be safer to let us get you back to the castleship.”

“He’s right, Pidge,” Hunk said. “We don’t know what other effects that thing might have on us, and I don’t want to find out going ninety miles an hour.”

“The speeders are literally a hundred metres away,” she said, then relented. “But I see your point. We’ll stay out here and let Shiro know what happened. Watch out for those druranus.”

Lance gave her a jaunty salute as he followed Keith into the woods. “On the one hand,” he said to Keith’s back, “I’m sad we didn’t get to see the druranus for ourselves. But on the other, I’m also _really_ glad we didn’t meet them. How weird would that be? I mean, swapping with you or Hunk wouldn’t be too bad, but poor Pidge is a whole other country, so to speak— _oof._ ” He crashed into Keith’s back, who had stopped without warning. “What’s your prob—oh.” Lance could see over Keith’s shoulder to where Hunk and Pidge parked their speeders. Still sitting on the seat of the yellow speeder was a druranu.

Hunk’s initial assessment was right; it looked like a mottled, football-sized, overstuffed cushion with the face of a hose. It was making a burbling sound that sounded content, but who knew with aliens.

“What’s the plan now, fearless leader?” Lance asked.

“Well, we can’t touch it,” Keith growled. “Maybe we can lure it away somehow.”

“I’m open to ideas of how to do that.”

“Um.” Keith glanced around, then picked up a rock.

 _Unbelievable._ “Jesus, Keith, are you hoping to knock it out? I’ll tell Pidge that you were mean to an animal, and once she gets used to Hunk’s body, _well,_ I don’t have to tell you what will happen.”

“Will you please shut up? I’m not going to hit it. Look.” He pointed to the speeder. “There're bits of gravel around it. Maybe it eats rocks.”

“Eats—really? That’s a leap even for you.”

“Fine, whatever. Let me know when you come up with a better plan.” He lobbed the rock in a gentle underhand. It landed next to the speeder’s rear...wheel? Energy ball? Lance really ought to ask Hunk how all these things worked one day. The druranu appeared to perk up as much as an animal with no facial features could perk up. It crawled to the edge of the speeder, but lost its grip and tumbled to the ground with a soft _whump._

A skittering, chittering sound behind Lance caused the hair on the back of his neck to lift. He turned, then grabbed for Keith. “Uh, buddy? New problem here.”

“Lance, come on, we need to grab the speeders before that thing realizes what’s happened.”

“Yeah, but what about the other one?”

Keith froze. He turned to Lance with wide eyes. “Other one?”

Lance pointed to the druranu hanging in the tree like a sloth. It chittered with malevolent intent at them. “I think it’s the other one’s mate.”

“Oh, fu—” was all Keith got out before the alien blasted them and everything went dark.

&&&

Keith was having an out-of-body experience.

He stared at his unconscious body as it lay stretched out on an examination table in the med bay. Coran had decided that a healing pod wasn’t necessary since there weren’t any physical injuries.

“No one else was out this long,” Keith said. He kept touching the shorter hair at the back of his neck.

“The neural reassignment affects people differently,” Coran said. “There shouldn’t be any lasting damage, but we’ll have to wait until he wakes up.” He changed a few settings on a screen. “You know, people used to bring druranus to parties when I was young. Led to quite interesting situations, I can tell you! Or maybe I won’t.” Coran laughed. “Perhaps we’ll leave those stories for when you’re older.”

The body on the table twitched and moaned, pulling back Keith’s attention. Familiar grey eyes blinked open and met Keith’s gaze. There was a moment of confusion before they widened in fear.

 _“What the hell happened to me,”_ Lance said as he bolted upright.

Coran placed a restraining hand on Lance’s shoulder. “Easy there, son. You’ve just experienced a neural reassignment with your fellow paladin. No harm done.”

“No harm done?” Lance stared at the red and white armour he now wore. His breathing became shallow and too fast. “I’m in the wrong body! I’d say harm done. That means...” He made a strangled sound as he saw Keith wearing Lance’s face and reached out towards him.

Keith slapped his hand away. “Quit it, you weirdo.”

“Me? What—” Lance frowned. “How did I get here? The last thing I remember is that alien shooting us in the face.”

“I carried you out,” Keith said and gave Lance a pointed look. “Again.”

“Heh. Thanks?” Lance pulled off one glove and ran his fingers over his face. “Man, your skin is dry.” His fingers then went into his hair and he groaned. “And I’m stuck with the mullet? C’mon.”

 _“Do not cut my hair,”_ Keith warned. “We’re going to have to make rules like Pidge and Hunk.”

As if summoned by the sound of their names, the other paladins appeared at the door. “Is he awake?” Hunk asked at the same time Pidge said, “Is he freaking out?”

“He’s fine,” Coran said. “A little high blood pressure, but everything seems to be normal.”

“Why does everyone keep saying that?” Lance said.

“Hey, at least we’re all in the same boat,” Hunk said as he came up to Lance’s side.

“Yeah, about that.” Shiro came into the room, appearing half exasperated and half amused. “Let me get this straight: you all switched bodies while on a non-combat mission? Within twenty minutes of landing?”

They all spoke at once. “It wasn’t our fault!”

“—was sitting there—”

“—not like I wanted this to happen—”

“Keith threw a rock at it.”

Keith glared at Lance, who gave him a shit-eating grin. It was a familiar expression for him, but on Keith’s face, it looked out of place.

Shiro waved them all down. “Alright, alright. It’s like the space mall all over again. As long as you’re okay. Right, Coran?”

“The effect is temporary. They should return to normal in about three quintants.”

That caused another round of shouting.

“‘Should’?”

_“Three days?”_

“People had three-day-long body-swapping parties?”

Hunk turned to Shiro. “Where’s Allura? Is she mad at us or something?”

Shiro glanced away and Keith saw he was fighting a grin. “Actually, she burst out laughing when I told her. She said, and I quote, ‘Only they could get into this kind of trouble.’” He looked at them all. Pidge was listing to the side due to her new height, Hunk kept accidentally hitting his glasses, Lance was feeling out the contours of his face, and Keith stood off to the side with his arms crossed. Shiro looked a little helpless. “Coran, maybe you can explain how this happened.”

Coran straightened from where he was putting the medical equipment away. “Of course! It’s actually a simple process. See, our brains are made up of electrical pulses, chemical reactions, and the physical layout of cells. While the combination of these is what makes each brain unique, it’s also easy to replicate.”

“Like a roadmap,” said Pidge.

“Exactly. All the druranu does is copy someone’s mind map and overlay it on another’s brain. It’s a defence mechanism meant to daze and confuse.”

“It certainly did that,” Lance muttered.

“Wait, wait,” Hunk said. “Does that mean that we’re still in here somewhere?”

Coran wilted under Hunk’s hopeful face. “Well, sort of. All the procedural memory is still there. You didn’t forget how to walk or speak. Those parts of you remain in the original brain. But the druranu copies all the other aspects of higher consciousness, like memories and decision-making.”

Pidge rubbed her temples. “It’s as if our brains are a memory stick that’s had all the old data put into an encrypted folder we can’t access, and new processing data has been added that our brains are using instead?”

Coran beamed. “Exactly, Number Five.” He looked Pidge’s new frame up and down. “Er, Number One.”

Keith finally asked what had been weighing most on his mind. “How will the lions react to us?”

Everyone fell quiet.

“Ah, yes, that may be a complication.” Coran tugged on his moustache, thinking.

“Great,” Keith said. “We’re grounded until this wears off.”

“Not necessarily. It could provide an interesting opportunity for experimentation.”

They all looked at each other. Shiro sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose right before Pidge burst out, “Mine first!” and took off down the hallway, Hunk hot on her heels cursing short legs.

Lance hopped off the examination table and grabbed Keith’s wrist. “C’mon, samurai, show me what that Red Lion of yours can do.”

Keith had time to shoot an exasperated look at Shiro, who gave him an equally exasperated look back, before Lance was dragging him off towards the hangers.

Red brushed his mind as they approached. It was muted, like listening to music from another room. “Whoa.”

“What?” Lance said, slowing down.

“It’s Red. I can still feel her.” He waved towards his temple and once again ran his hand through the short hair. He laughed a bit. “She’s wondering why I’m both Keith and Not-Keith now.” He considered Lance. “Can you feel her?”

Lance’s gaze unfocused. After a few moments, he startled. “Holy crap. She’s so different from Blue.” He looked back at Keith and his expression of wonder was pure Lance. “Blue’s like a big Labrador, all excited and friendly. But Red feels more like a greyhound. She just wants to _go._ Is this how she feels all the time?”

“I—I don’t know. I always imagined her more like a dust storm. It was overwhelming at first.”

He half-expected Red’s particle barrier to be up when he and Lance burst in. After all, it had taken mortal peril for the lion to acknowledge him as the Red Paladin; he doubted it would accept Lance just because he was occupying Keith’s body.

But the lion surprised him again. Not only was her barrier down, but she lay already crouched and waiting. “Looks like she’s as curious about you as you are about her,” Keith said.

“Awesome.” Lance grinned at him. “Remind me to introduce you to Blue after this. She’d get a real kick out of it.”

“You two are really close, aren’t you?”

“Well, yeah. Sometimes I come down here and sit in the cockpit and talk to her. It’s not quite like talking to Hunk or Pidge or Shiro, but she’s a good listener.”

Keith tried not to notice that Lance had left him off that list. “Come on, let’s try this out.”

Lance settled into the pilot’s seat like he was born to do so. Red’s various screens and readouts came to life. “Hold on,” Lance said and took off.

It was one thing to be piloting a lion and know exactly what you would do. It was another to be hanging on to the pilot’s seat watching everything spin out of control. Lance whooped as he sent the lion into loops around the castleship. The planet’s surface fell away from them and Keith groaned. “Why am I always at the mercy of the worst pilot in the galaxy?”

Lance laughed. “Can’t say that anymore! I have your reflexes, remember?” He pulled back on the controls. “What was that move you pulled in the last dogfight we had? Something like this?”

Keith’s stomach plummeted as they shot straight up, went into free-fall, then dropped into a hairpin turn. They ended up facing the opposite direction of where they started, and the extra G-forces pulled at Keith’s bones.

“This is crazy,” Keith shouted.

“This is incredible,” Lance shouted back.

A sensation like static electricity built at the base of Keith’s skull. “She’s laughing at you.”

“I know!” Lance laughed along with her.

Movement caught Keith’s eye. “Check it out. Pidge got the Yellow Lion working, too.”

Pidge’s voice—well, Pidge speaking through Hunk’s voice—crackled over the comm. “Oh my god, you guys, this thing is a _tank._ Why aren’t we sending Hunk first into every firefight we have?”

The offended squawk answering that question could only be Hunk, likely standing behind Pidge as Lance and Keith were doing. “We are _not_ doing that.”

They met up with Pidge and did a few manoeuvres, with the Red Lion outpacing Pidge every time. Keith kept watching Lance. He reminded Keith of when they found the Blue Lion and how Lance took to that naturally as well. He had the same fiery joy. It was odd to think it, but it looked good on Keith’s face. He couldn’t remember the last time he had reason to wear that expression himself.

“Alright, Hunk is bugging me for a go in Green,” Pidge eventually said. “We’re heading back to the castleship.”

“We’ll follow,” Lance said. He turned to Keith. “You want to try out Blue?”

“You think she would let me?”

“Let you? Dude, she’ll probably yell at me for leaving her out of the fun.” His voice softened. “Don’t worry, she’ll love you.”

Keith’s shoulders relaxed. “I—okay.”

Blue was as receptive as Lance said she would be. As Keith settled into the pilot seat, she was eager to try out this new Not-Lance. Keith wasn’t sure about being like a Labrador, but to him, Blue felt like the ozone and electricity before a thunderstorm. Not threatening, just anticipating. She was excited and eager and full of energy. They took off almost as soon as Keith took the controls.

She was slower than Red, but more stable. Keith could feel her confidence in herself and her pilot. “She reminds me of you,” Keith said to Lance standing behind him.

“Yeah?” he said. “It’s the blue eyes, isn’t it? I never realized how well we matched until I could see us from an outside perspective, so to speak.” Lance formed a box with his fingers, framing Keith.

Keith smiled, because of course Lance wouldn’t take it seriously. “No, I mean she’s optimistic. Like she has this supreme confidence that everything will be okay. There’re no worries or insecurities—what?”

Lance was staring at him. “And that reminds you of me?”

“Well, yeah.” Keith frowned. “Shouldn’t it?”

Lance opened his mouth to answer, but then pointed outside. “Look out!”

The Green Lion streaked past them as Keith pulled up hard on the controls. “Sorry,” Hunk called through the comm. “Still getting used to it. Why does everything have to be so tiny?”

“Hunk, if I find one scratch on her, I swear I’ll—”

“Pidge, trust me. Green doesn’t want to get damaged as much as I do. It’ll be fine.”

Shiro’s voice interrupted them. “When you come back to the castleship, Allura and I have some ideas to test out.”

Keith and Lance glanced at each other. “He means training, doesn’t he,” Lance said.

“Yup.”

&&&

Lance glanced around the training deck. All of them stood watching Shiro with various degrees of excitement and apprehension on their faces. Nothing good came out of training exercises, but if it was Shiro’s idea, then it might be survivable. Lance would have gone on strike if it had been Coran’s.

“Allura and I were discussing this, erm, situation,” Shiro said as he waved towards the four other paladins, “and we realized that while we’re all comfortable in our roles—heavy gunner, melee fighter, sharpshooter—” Lance nudged Keith at the last one. Shiro continued. “We’re also too easily thrown off balance. If one of us is out of commission, we need to be ready to step in and fill their spot until they’re back. Sound good?”

A chorus of murmurs.

“We’ll start with a hand-to-hand round robin. Lance, you’re with me; Keith with Pidge; and Hunk with Allura.”

They squared off. Lance eyed Shiro’s cybernetic arm. “You're not going to blast me with that, are you?”

“Lance, focus.” That was all the warning Shiro gave before launching himself at Lance.

Now, Lance could hold his own in a fight. He had experience in everything from down-and-dirty street brawls to the more refined disarm-and-neutralize style the Garrison taught. Even so, he knew why he had a rifle as a weapon. Someone like Keith got up close and personal in a fight while Lance would rather step back and evaluate the situation.

Plus, he was fighting Shiro, who had spent a year _winning_ in an interstellar gladiator ring. Lance didn’t expect to last very long.

Then it got strange. Lance was on the defensive from Shiro’s constant blows and feints and kept backing away. He was all too aware of the lost three inches of height that came with being in Keith’s body.

“C’mon, Lance,” Shiro said. He wasn’t even out of breath. “Never going to win like that.”

The taunt sparked something in Lance’s brain. The next time Shiro’s arm came down in what would have been a strike straight to the temple, Lance ignored his impulse to step to the side and instead moved forward. It put him inside Shiro’s guard, who didn’t have time to react. Lance grabbed Shiro’s outstretched arm and twisted, using his momentum to throw him over Lance’s shoulder. It was the same move Keith had used on Pidge in the forest.

Shiro landed with a _whump_ and for a second, he lay still. Then he was laughing. He rolled to the side and stood up, dusting himself off.

Lance blinked in shock. “What happened?”

“I think you tapped into some of those reflexes.” Shiro knocked his knuckles into the side of Lance’s head. “That move was all Keith.”

Lance stared at his hands. “Whoa.” He turned to watch the others. It looked like Pidge had abandoned all technique and was simply trying to pin Keith down. Keith, meanwhile, was darting all over the place, unable to predict Pidge’s wild haymakers.

Hunk had chosen simply to stay behind Allura as she twisted to keep him in her sights. It was like watching a fox going after a particularly wily rabbit.

“I don’t think the others are doing any tapping,” Lance said.

Shiro sighed and called an end to the first round.

The next few rounds also went poorly. Lance couldn’t do any more ‘tapping,’ even when facing Keith himself, and the others were still too new to their bodies to be effective. It was like when they had first arrived at the Castle of Lions all over again and lacked the half-instinctual ability to work together. Shiro cut that exercise short as well.

“Right, that was...informative,” Shiro said. Lance saw Allura cover her smile with her hand. “We already know you can fly each other’s lions. Now, let’s see about weapons. Activate your bayards.”

Hunk went first, but instead of the grappling hook–electroshock thing that was Pidge’s bayard, what came out looked more like a crossbow. “Cool.”

“What did you do to it?” said Pidge in a tight voice.

“Nothing,” Hunk shot back.

“It’s fine, it’s okay,” Coran said, stepping between them. “The bayards are responding to your altered brain patterns. The green bayard is reflecting Hunk’s preference for ranged weapons while retaining Pidge’s taste for versatility.”

Pidge raised her bayard speculatively and activated it. Hunk’s heavy Gatling gun had shrunk into a hand cannon. She aimed it at the wall and shot a huge laser ball. She rested it against her shoulder and turned to Hunk. “Okay, you’re forgiven.”

Keith lifted the blue bayard and was suddenly holding a long rifle with a bayonet on the end. He looked through the sight and strafed it back and forth. “Not bad.” He cocked an eyebrow at Lance. “Well?”

“I bet I get something really cool, like a broadsword or a mace or flail—” He cut himself off as he stared at the red bayard in his hand. The thin blade looked delicate, nothing like Keith’s intimidating sword. “What the hell is this?”

Keith had been muffling himself, but at Lance’s outburst, he couldn’t contain his laughter. “Something you want to tell us, Lance?”

Lance glared at him, caught between indignation and shock that Keith would make such an innuendo. “Hey, it’s _your_ body.”

Pidge leaned in to inspect the blade. “Looks like a rapier. It’s meant for running people through rather than cutting them in half.”

Lance brightened. “I can make robot shish kebab. Cool!”

He saw Shiro nod to Coran out of the corner of his eye. “Gladiator program level one,” Coran said.

 _Uh oh._ The four of them automatically gathered together.

“We can do this,” Keith said. “We’ve been through worse. We stick together, and everything will be fine.”

&&&

The gladiator kicked their asses.

“That could’ve gone worse,” Hunk said as they dragged themselves out.

“It could have gone a whole lot better, too,” Pidge said.

Lance rubbed the back of his neck. Sweat had caused his hair to stick to his skin and honestly, it was gross. How could Keith stand it? He made a mental note to rectify it as soon as possible. “Anyone else want a break? I need to get out of this armour.” Everyone turned to look at him. “What?”

“You realize that you’ll have to change into my clothes, right?” Keith said.

“What? Of course—oh.” Lance glanced down at himself. “Yeah, I guess we need to talk about that.”

Keith waved him off. “Just—be prudent. And I don’t want to hear about it.” He turned away and left down the hall.

“I didn’t think he’d be that cavalier about it,” Hunk said.

“Don’t think you’ll be getting off so easily,” Pidge growled.

Hunk put Lance between Pidge and himself. “Not at all. I have the utmost respect for you. I would sleep in this armour if I could.”

Pidge rolled her eyes. “Close your eyes or something. Keith’s right; I don’t want to know.”

“Roger that,” Hunk said. He looked helplessly at Lance. “I guess meet back for dinner?”

“Yeah.” Lance looked at his red-and-white armour. “Keith better have more clothes than pointless gloves and half a jacket.”

&&&

Keith had to admit, Lance’s clothes were comfortable. His jacket seemed to be ninety percent pockets, all filled with oddities. The guy was as much of a hoarder as Pidge.

He sat at the counter in the kitchen watching Pidge and Hunk fight over the equipment.

“Hey, Keith, check it out.” Pidge grinned as she pulled a wide, shallow pan out of Hunk’s hands. She snickered as Hunk tried to take it back while Pidge held it out of reach.

Hunk scowled. “You are abusing your newfound power and oppressing the underdog.”

She handed him the pan. “I only get to be tall for three days. Can’t you let me enjoy it? You get it, right, Keith?”

“Lance is three inches taller than me,” Keith said. “It’s not that big a deal.”

“Did someone call my name?” Lance swanned through the doorway, and Keith’s eyes nearly bugged out of his head.

Lance had raided Keith’s closet and had foregone the jacket, gloves, and thankfully, the knife, but made one small change that Keith hadn’t foreseen.

Keith gripped the edge of the counter. “I thought I told you not to change my hair.”

“Chillax, man.” He hopped up on the stool beside Keith. “I put it up. Honestly, how can you do anything with it in your face all the time? I borrowed a hair tie from Allura; you can thank me later. Speaking of which, I actually moisturized this desert you call a face, and for _that,_ you can thank me now.” He finally caught the look on Keith’s face. “What?”

“You—what—you did what?” He had told Lance to be prudent, not play fairy godmother.

“Actually, it’s not a bad look,” Hunk piped up from where he was trying to climb the cupboards.

“Exactly,” Lance said. He leaned one elbow on the counter and raised an eyebrow at Keith, all smarmy cockiness. “Like what you see?”

“I—” Two terrifying sensations struck Keith. The first was the bizarre wonder if Lance would have the same reaction if Keith himself made that same flirtatious expression, namely dumbstruck confusion rather than irritation.

The other was that Keith felt something lurch in his chest.

“What?” he said, momentarily thrown off. He put a hand to his chest to make sure Lance hadn’t secretly developed an arrhythmia.

Lance waved his hand in front of Keith’s face. “Hello, spaceship to Keith. What is up with you? Coran did say the body-swap thing might scramble your mind. Guess it affected you more than the rest of us.”

The absurdity of that statement snapped Keith back to the present. “Lance, you _passed out_ for half an hour.”

“Yeah, but how will we know if it affected his mind?” Pidge said. “He was already scrambled to begin with.”

“You better make sure he takes care of yours,” Hunk said to Keith. “Or it might not be the same when you get it back.”

Lance pouted. “How am I the one being made fun of here?”

“Because it’s easy,” Pidge said. “Like this, look.” And she picked Hunk up by the scruff of the neck. She ignored his angry exclamation and continued, “I mean, Hunk is this strong _all the time._ Why isn’t he a supervillain already?”

Lance was laughing at Hunk’s scowl. “Luckily for all of us, he’s not you, Pidge.”

“Three days cannot go by fast enough,” Hunk muttered.


	2. Chapter 2

Lance woke up the next morning utterly bewildered that Keith did not own a single brush. All Lance found was a cheap pocket comb that did nothing to tame the unruly bedhead he had developed. He rattled around in the drawers muttering about bringing Keith a gift basket full of bare necessities when there was a knock at the door.

There had been a tense moment the night before as the paladins tried to determine where to sleep: in their own rooms or in the room of their “host body,” as Pidge disgustingly put it. Shiro had listened to them argue back and forth until he finally ordered them to their host’s rooms so they wouldn’t need to pack an overnight bag.

“I’m coming in,” Keith called from the other side of the door. “Make sure you’re decent or whatever. It’s only my room and my body,” he grumbled as the door slid open. He scowled at the open drawers. “What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to make you not look like a crazy survivalist,” Lance said. He inspected Keith’s treatment of his own hair. “What did you do to it?”

Keith touched his hair self-consciously. “Nothing. I washed it and combed it out. It’s fine.”

Lance squinted at him, but let it go. Keith wouldn’t be able to ruin all his hard work in three days. “What do you want?”

Instead of answering, Keith went over to the bed and pulled his knife out from under the mattress.

“Why am I not surprised?” Lance said. “What is it with you and that knife, anyway?”

Keith paused, hands still fixing the sheath to his belt. “It’s from Earth.” His voice was flat.

“A memento. I get it. At least you had it on you when we...” Lance trailed off, not wanting to get into _that_ discussion this early in the morning, and made the mistake of looking up at Keith. It was like a double-exposed photograph with Keith’s sharp gaze coming from Lance’s face. Lance didn’t look away.

Keith’s mouth twisted. “I’m sorry. Most of us, we were looking for something out there.” He waved in the general direction of the alien planet outside. “Pidge, Shiro...me. You and Hunk were kinda dragged along for the ride. You didn’t get a choice.”

“Hey, hey, hey, no,” Lance said even as his brain wanted to explore this rare open Keith. “Don’t make me out as some kidnapped damsel in distress. _None_ of us would be here if I hadn’t activated the Blue Lion. I’m as much to blame as anyone else.”

Keith blinked, then smiled. It was a soft half-smile that quirked up at one corner like the flourish at the end of a signature. It was such a Lance smile that he knew Keith wasn’t doing it deliberately. He also knew it was bizarre to notice these things about his own face.

“Are you trying to compete with me over who’s to blame?” Keith said.

“Yes. No. Maybe.” Lance threw his hands up. “I don’t know anymore.”

Keith’s laugh was barely a breath, and he kept smiling down at Lance.

The sudden tightness over his skin was unfamiliar and Lance decided it was the vulnerability that came with looking _up_ at someone rather than down. Standing close to Keith made the height difference even more obvious. When had he stepped closer?

Keith clearly wasn’t used to looking down at people, either. He hadn’t tilted his head, only lowered his eyes, making him look even softer than usual and Lance’s heart beat against his chest—

He stepped back and turned to the open drawer. _What the fuck._ Where was this coming from? Was it more muscle-memory tapping? _Because what the fuck._

“What were you looking for, anyway?” Keith said, also leaning over the drawer.

“You don’t have a proper comb,” Lance said in an almost normal voice.

“Oh, yeah, I just kind of—” Keith tousled his fingers through his hair. “When it’s wet.”

Lance stared at him.

“What?” said Keith.

“You need an intervention.”

&&&

Lance had run off claiming hunger, so Keith eventually wandered down to the hangers.

He ran his hands over Blue’s controls while she emitted a soft machine whir that Lance would probably call purring. Lance anthropomorphized things, a trait that was spreading if how Keith thought of Red was any sign. Keith sat in the darkened cockpit and took in how different Blue felt. He kept flashing back to when he and Lance were flying. Specifically, to Lance’s look of surprise when Keith compared him to Blue.

Keith wasn’t an idiot. He may not have the greatest track record of interacting with people, but he had a perfect score in observing them. He knew a lot of Lance’s behaviour was all bluster, but had put it down to simple posturing. After all, Lance was stuck on a spaceship with two ancient aliens, a military hero, a computer genius, a brilliant engineer-slash-cook, and—Keith snorted—‘the greatest pilot of their generation.’ No wonder Lance felt he had to prove something.

But maybe it ran deeper than that. Keith had been feeling off ever since that bizarre moment in the kitchen. After talking with Lance, he had watched Hunk and Pidge fool around with one of Pidge’s co-opted Galra bots. Then watched Shiro and Allura plot a course through a new solar system. And watched Coran reboot an old security system. Watching, always watching. A hesitation now sat in his chest where before Keith would have intruded, or even found something on his own to do. Keith may be the loner, but Lance was always the one on the outside.

In fact, the only person Keith didn’t have that hesitation with was Lance himself. It felt easy to check if Lance was alright with being stolen from Earth, or goad him into his usual competitive histrionics. It was some normalcy in this whole weird mess.

Keith rubbed his face. Maybe it was Lance’s eyesight making him feel off-kilter. The colours looked sharp and confusing through Lance’s eyes, and he might have a touch of night blindness.

“So,” he said to the empty cockpit. Blue perked up. “Lance says he comes and talks to you sometimes. I’m trying to get into his head, I suppose. See what it’s like.” He patted the controls.

Blue’s answer was like a bubbling stream. She always felt so happy. Not that Red was _unhappy,_ but Red mostly wanted to get the job done as fast as possible. There was a reason she was the sword.

“What are the others like? The other lions?”

Blue’s answer flooded his mind in a swirl of bubbles and white foam. Keith flinched back.

“Sorry, I’m not as good at this as Lance. Maybe one at a time? Like, what about the Yellow Lion?”

Blue’s burbling stream dipped underground to become a rushing, explosive force hidden by silent rock.

“Cool,” he breathed.

Blue continued her assessments of the others. The Green Lion was seafoam reaching up the beach, and the Black Lion was a glacier burning its way through a mountain.

“And Red? What about her?”

A wisp of steam curled and twisted across Keith’s mind like warm breath on a cold day. It was so gentle and quiet that he had trouble believing it was the same Red Lion who punched holes in ships. “That’s Red?”

Blue burbled again, entertained by his surprise. The steam gathered until it was like Keith was sinking into a natural hot spring. It was safe and warm and relaxing.

“She sounds pretty cool coming from you.”

The back of his neck tingled as Blue laughed at him. She pushed the hot spring into his mind again with an additional presence. A formless shadow floated next to Keith.

“Wait.” He frowned. “Is that supposed to be _me?_ ” The shadow was so small, yet perfectly at ease in the hot spring.

He leaned forward. “I should be with Red more. I guess I never thought you guys would want to listen to us. You’re, well, _alien._ ” Blue chuckled again. “What does Lance talk to you about?”

Blue’s presence in his mind shifted, and Keith got the impression she was cocking her head in thought. An image of muddled green and blue flickered before resolving itself into a rough globe.

“Earth, huh? That makes sense.” Keith rubbed a hand through his short hair. The back was getting long, and his fingers lingered there. “He left a lot behind there.”

Another image. Five coloured sparks flew past in formation. That was clearly Voltron, and Keith was going to comment on it when it was replaced with the Red Lion’s hot spring again. The shadow was still there.

Keith huffed. “He talks about me? What, does he complain about me to my face _and_ behind my back?”

At that, Blue pressed the hot spring forward. The warmth seeped into Keith’s muscles and relaxed them. It was not a feeling associated with a person someone mistrusted. He fell back in the pilot seat. “Huh.”

There was a commotion out in the hanger as someone called his name. Keith climbed out of the lion to see Hunk standing there with the biggest grin Keith had ever seen.

“Keith, I discovered something amazing, and I need an accomplice.”

“A what?” He squinted at Hunk. “What is this about?”

“All of Pidge’s computers are biometrically locked, meaning—” He wiggled his fingers. “I can get into them.”

“So?”

Hunk grabbed Keith’s shoulders. “So, we can get into _Pidge’s computer._ Haven’t you ever wanted to know what lurked in that cave of wonders?”

“Why me? Shouldn’t you be asking Lance to do this with you?”

Hunk glanced around as if Lance might come through the hanger doors. “Look, do I want the guy who regularly snuck out of school, or the guy who tried to blow it up?”

Keith rolled his eyes. “I didn’t ‘blow it up.’” Hunk’s infectious grin crept onto his own face. “But I can see your point.” After all, he was the one who ignored both Shiro and Allura about training when they first arrived. He wasn’t exactly a follow-the-rules kind of guy. “I’m in.”

Hunk cheered as he grabbed Keith’s wrist and ran for the door. “Come on, I think Pidge is busy in the garden, and she can only tolerate dirt for so long.”

Keith laughed and heard it echo in Blue’s rumble as they left.

&&&

After the incident in Keith’s room—and the weirdness that was eating breakfast goo with Keith’s taste buds—Lance went to the person least likely to laugh at him if he needed to talk about said weirdness: Pidge.

“Pick up a tool and help if you want to stay.” They were in the greenhouse, an empty room that first Hunk and then Pidge took over after their time on Olkari. They had conscripted Coran to help put it together and now it was full of pots, soil, and lush vegetation, both edible and decorative.

Lance rubbed his hands together, feeling the callouses that Keith’s constant weapons training had caused. He hoped they would protect him from manual labour, too. He picked up a small trowel and started transplanting seedlings. “How’s this body-swap thing working out for you?” he asked.

Pidge put on an air of great dignity. “I am a scientist. As such, I am approaching this with objectivity and discretion.” She caught Lance’s flat look. “I pretended to be a boy for almost a year. This? This is nothing.”

Lance laughed and went back to the seedlings. Half the plants that Hunk and Pidge had added to the garden were in hydroponic towers, and the rest were in good old-fashioned dirt. He breathed in the bright, organic scent where everything else in the castleship was clean metal.

“What about you?”

Lance turned. Pidge was trimming the plants at the top of the towers. She had a sly grin on. “Me?” he asked.

“Yeah, you.”

“It’s fine. I mean, yeah, it’s strange to be in someone’s body, but in little ways, you know?” Lance put down the trowel and covered first his right eye, then his left. “I think Keith might be colourblind or something. Not full-on colourblind, though. It’s not like he’s mixed up the Red and Green lions. But some colours are a little dull and some are really sharp. And he sees really well in the dark, too. Must have eaten tons of carrots when he was young. Oh, and let me tell you about the taste.” His stuck his tongue out. “His mouth has to be broken. That space goo tastes _good_ to him.”

Pidge mirrored his flat look. “That’s it?”

Lance paused, but really, who was Pidge going to tell? She would take a secret to her grave. “Okay, I may have checked to see if Keith had any secret tattoos or piercings.”

She perked up. “And?”

“Nothing! Not even an embarrassing birthmark. The dude’s skin is flawless, which, considering how little he cares for it, is a miracle in itself.”

“Flawless, huh?” The sly grin was back.

Lance pointed the trowel at her. “Is Hunk invading your brain? I get enough of those looks from him.”

“What looks?”

“ _Those_ looks. The ones that say, ‘oh, but I thought he was your _rival,_ and now you’re being all _nice_ about him.’”

“Hunk can say that with a look?”

“He has a very eloquent face. You should take advantage of it.”

Pidge cut a large orange bloom that smelled like sugar cookies and tucked it behind her ear. She then picked up a bundle of tiny purple flowers and begun weaving them into a crown. “And what do you say to those looks?”

Lance put down the trowel, sensing danger but unsure why. “I usually throw something at him or threaten to take away his lion repair privileges.”

“Hmm. But no denial.”

He scowled at her. “Shut up. It’s bad enough—” He shut his mouth with a snap.

With extreme nonchalance, she said, “Oh?”

Lance took a deep breath and looked her dead in the eye. “Pidge, you’re the best secret keeper I’ve ever met and you have to promise that you will not repeat what I’m about to say.”

Pidge raised an eyebrow, but settled down beside him. “I promise.”

“How much of Hunk is present in there?”

She lifted a hand to adjust her non-existent glasses before dropping it to her lap. “You mean all that background stuff Coran mentioned?”

“Yeah.”

“Not much. He reacts to some smells I wouldn’t even notice, and there’s the whole vertigo thing. It seems to be tied to physical stimuli rather than emotional ones.” She placed the flower crown on his head. “But it’s been more with you.”

The crown smelled like red licorice. Lance settled it more firmly on his head. “There was sparring with Shiro yesterday, and this morning, Keith came to talk with me and started needling me, and just seeing him standing there with my body—I don’t know, it was like I wanted to fight him or something.”

“Or something,” Pidge said.

“I don’t want his feelings in my head,” Lance blurted. Pidge looked at him in surprise, but said nothing. “I think that’s what this is. I don’t feel like myself and yes, I know how that sounds, don’t give me that look. My skin is all tight and shivery and my shoulders tense up and I can’t stop rubbing my fingers together when I’m nervous. I thought all that stuff was supposed to be in the background, not controlling us. I don’t want to be out of control of my body, or my own thoughts.”

“But it’s not your body,” Pidge said with an unexpected gentleness. “And you can’t really control it any more than you can control your own reactions to stuff. You gotta ride it out.”

Lance toyed with the trowel still in his lap. “I feel like I’m intruding on something private.”

“You just told me you looked for secret tattoos.”

“That’s different,” Lance insisted. “That’s—look, if I had a secret tattoo, I would obviously expect Keith to find it. That’s out there in the wind and you can’t hide it.” Pidge was staring hard at him, and he decided the small herbs he was transplanting were suddenly very interesting. “But the other stuff? The way his heart beats faster when I think about flying Red, or how his stomach knots up when I see all the Galra outposts we haven’t cleared out yet? That’s stuff he hides. He doesn’t want us to see it.” He groaned and covered his face with his hands, heedless of the dirt. “What the hell is this, Pidge?”

She sighed. “We all have stuff we don’t want to show others, okay? When we’re scared, or frustrated, or don’t know what we’re doing. We _all_ get that. Maybe the issue isn’t whether you know Keith worries about stuff, but that maybe he’s doing the same thing.” At Lance’s puzzled frown, she said, “He’s in your body, too! God, I hate saying that. But maybe he’s getting all your internalized crap, and you know what that means?”

He shook his head.

“That you both have internalized crap and maybe you should talk about your shared internalized crap.”

The plant in front of him looked like a squash, but smelled and tasted like coconut. Lance rubbed its leaves between his fingers to release the scent of piña coladas and sunscreen. “I don’t know. Do you think he even wants to talk about that stuff?”

“Do you?” Pidge peered at him owlishly.

In response, Lance picked up the trowel and stabbed it into the pile of loose dirt. “Still got a lot of these to finish up.”

She allowed the deflection. She stood with a sigh and murmured, “This won’t go away once you switch back, you know.”

“Give me this, Pidge. Just until I figure out what’s going on.”

“Fine. But don’t think I’ll act surprised when this comes around and bites you in the ass.”

&&&

The proximity alert sounded as Pidge and Lance finished in the greenhouse.

“You gotta be shitting me,” Pidge muttered.

They raced up to the bridge where Shiro and Allura were looking at the hologram map. A small dot was moving towards the planet. Coran, Keith, and Hunk stood ready at their consoles.

“What are you wearing?” Keith asked.

The flower crown still rested on Lance’s head. He huffed as he took it off and placed it on his own console. “Is it an attack?”

“No,” Allura said. “It looks like a recon ship. Small and not heavily armed. They weren’t looking for us intentionally.”

“They found us when we’re the least ready to fight them,” Keith said. “Great.”

Pidge was scanning the map. “Do we take them out and maybe alert the Galra we’re here when their ship doesn’t return, or do we stay hidden and hope it doesn’t find us?”

Shiro and Allura shared a look. “If we attack,” Shiro said, “we need to do it fast and hard before they can send a distress signal back. And, if possible, make it look like the ship crashed instead of being shot down.”

Allura continued. “We go dark until we’re sure the ship is headed for us.” She faced the paladins. “But be ready.”

“Hope for the best, prepare for the worst,” Hunk said. “Got it.”

The mood was sombre as they suited up as if even walking too loudly would alert the Galra ship to their presence.

Lance watched Keith wander around the bridge. Lance’s normal response to stress and waiting was movement, something that was apparently ingrained into his brain. Keith’s body, on the other hand, seemed to shut down; it felt calm and cold and like it could sit waiting in these chairs all day.

That, of course, made Lance more anxious.

The Galra ship was circling around the other side of the planet when Keith growled, “I wish they would make up their minds.”

“How close do they have to come before we make a move?” Pidge asked Allura.

Allura stared resolutely at the hologram. “Until they come within firing range.”

“What’s that old saying? Until we see the whites of their eyes?” Hunk said. “Or in the Galra’s case, the yellows.”

“What a fitting colloquialism,” Coran said, but he didn’t have his usual enthusiasm for Earth oddities.

Lance toyed with his helmet. It wasn’t any different from the blue one he normally wore, but it felt like it had extra weight added to it. Like Keith had imbued all of his battle-ready, single-mindedness into his armour. As he watched Keith pace past him for the fifth time, he stood up. “Okay, quick tip,” he said to Keith. “Get something for your hands to do. I have a mess of little puzzles back in my room and probably a couple in my jacket.” He reached under the console he normally sat at and pulled out a set of interlocking wooden pieces. He pushed it into Keith’s hands. “Try that. Take it apart and put it together again as many times as you can. It helps focus all the junk in your head.”

Keith stared down at the little puzzle. “Thanks.”

“No problem.” Lance caught Pidge’s eye over Keith’s shoulder. She really was taking advantage of Hunk’s eloquent face and was sending him one of _those_ looks. “I know it helps me when things get hairy,” he said to Keith.

A deep boom rumbled through the castle.

Coran’s fingers flew over his console. “The ship had a payload. Probably a mining missile. It breaks through a planet’s crust and analyses it for useful minerals,” he explained for the benefit of the others.

“Will it detect the castleship?” Shiro asked.

Coran and Allura shared a glance that spoke volumes.

Shiro turned to the other paladins. “Alright, guys, hit it hard and fast. Don’t draw the fight out, just get the ship down. And do _not_ let it escape.”

“We can disrupt any signal it might try to send from here,” Coran said. “But it gives away our position.”

Shiro nodded. “Then be on the defensive. Everyone, to your lions.”

It was a mad scramble to the hangers. Lance kept heading towards Blue’s hanger before cursing and correcting himself. Hunk’s voice over the comms let him know Lance wasn’t the only one discombobulated. “It’s one ship, right?” Hunk said. “We can take that. It’ll be fine. We’re all flying new lions into a real firefight for the first time, but we can handle it. It’ll be fine.”

“Hunk, focus,” Keith’s voice cut in. “We can do this. _You_ can do this. The lions already adapted to us. We have to listen to them if something feels off.”

Despite everything, Lance laughed. “You’ve been talking to Blue, haven’t you?”

A pause. Then: “Maybe.”

“I knew it. Can’t resist the blue eyes.” Lance skidded to a halt in front of the Red Lion. “Okay, Red, you ready to do this?”

The lion’s eyes flashed and Lance didn’t hesitate.

The Red Lion was as headstrong as before, telling Lance they needed to _go, go, go_ because an enemy was threatening her family. He saw the other lions fall into formation through the view screen.

“Stay close to the tree line,” Shiro said. “Under the radar, like in the simulator back home.”

“But Lance always crashed the simulator,” Keith said, and Lance couldn’t stop the indignant squawk before his brain caught up.

“Did Keith just make a joke?” he asked. “Everybody heard that, right?”

“I heard Keith making fun of you,” Pidge said. “Nothing unusual about that.”

And suddenly he felt lighter. They were still _them_ , even in the wrong bodies and the wrong lions. Keith was right; they could do this.

The fighter ship was hovering over the immense crater its missile caused. Pidge swept under it, intending to catch it with a brutal upward head smash, but it rolled sideways at the last second. The ship darted away over the trees, then turned back as it narrowly avoided Blue harrying it towards the others. The ship was small and nimble and quickly learned to keep close to the lions, like a pilot fish darting around a shark. They couldn’t hit it without risking friendly fire. Meanwhile, the fighter ship could fire at them at its leisure. Lance felt Red’s fury when it got off a lucky shot across her left flank.

“C’mon, girl, you can keep up with this punk.” Red weaved and dived around the other lions, but couldn’t quite get the fighter in line with her laser.

The Black Lion clipped it enough to send the fighter spinning into the forest. Several trees went down with it, but there was no explosion.

“Is that it?” Hunk asked. “Did we do it?”

“Oh, crap,” Pidge said.

The fighter ship was rising from the trees, looking battered but whole. Then it fractured into a dozen pieces.

“Stay together,” Shiro warned. “And watch each other’s backs.”

Each piece of the ship swivelled and convulsed like a nightmare Rubik’s Cube. They rearranged themselves into smaller copies of the larger fighter ship, then headed straight for the lions.

Now it was the lions being harried back and forth as they dodged laser blasts. “You know, Zarkon could at least send us a memo if he’s testing out new toys,” Lance said. He went into a tight backflip that allowed Red to blast the mini ship that had been following her.

“Lance, on your right,” called Keith.

Lance dropped straight down on instinct—thank you, Keith’s reflexes—leaving the mini ship exposed. The Green Lion blasted it to smithereens.

It was close, but they were winning. The mini ships were easier to separate and pick off than the lone fighter.

Then Hunk said, “Wait, something’s wrong—” and an explosion next to Green’s head knocked the lion out of the sky.

“Hunk,” Lance cried. “Shiro, did you see what happened?”

“One ship fired something.” Shiro’s voice was tight. “It stuck on to the Green Lion before exploding.”

“They’re sticky grenades,” Pidge shouted. More grenades exploded on Yellow’s hind legs before Pidge took out another two mini ships, leaving five to go. “I can’t dodge them fast enough up here. I’ll check on Hunk.”

“Ten-four,” Shiro replied, going into a sharp barrel roll to avoid another barrage of grenades.

The tide had turned. They had to avoid the grenades, the laser blasts, and each other. It was chaos.

Lance scraped Red along the trees, trying to dislodge a grenade from her left foreleg. It didn’t work, and the explosion sent her careening sideways. “How the hell do we get rid of these things? They’re worse than gum.” He stopped as a memory rose to the surface of his mind like a bubble. He was young, maybe seven or eight, and he had sat on some gum someone left on the park bench. He had been distraught because they were new jeans, not hand-me-downs, but his mother told him not to worry and stuffed his jeans in the freezer. Then they could scrape the frozen gum off with ease.

“Keith, I have an idea,” Lance said. “You need to freeze them off.”

“What?”

“Blue’s ice blast! Use it.”

“I can’t—I don’t have that connection with her!”

Lance growled in frustration. “Just trust me. Trust _her._ She’ll let you.”

A huff of breath. “Fine.”

Lance left him to it. “Pidge, you there?”

“I’m here,” she said. “Hunk’s here, too. He’s fine. Those grenades scrambled Green’s wires, but we’re working to get her up and running.”

“We’ll give you cover,” Shiro said.

“Lance.” Keith’s voice was clear and quiet in a way that meant he was on the one-to-one channel, not the open one.

“Keith? What’s wrong?”

“I can’t activate the ice blast. Blue, she—I don’t know, she won’t let me in.”

“You have to relax, man.” Lance catapulted a mini ship straight into the jaws of the Black Lion. Four left. “She’s not like Red. She won’t jump because you said the goal was how high.”

“What? That doesn’t—” A harsh exhale. “I need help.”

Lance paused, startled at the admission, and a mini ship took the moment to hit him with grenades. They landed all along Red’s back and Lance had run out of time. “Look, it’s what you said yesterday. She’s confident, she’s excited, she wants you to trust her as much as she trusts you. Let her in. _You got to take that risk._ ”

“Okay, okay, I just—”

“Now, Keith!”

A countdown thrummed through Lance’s head. How long ago did those grenades hit? Ten seconds? Fifteen? Red was twisting along a rocky outcrop to dislodge them, but Lance knew it wouldn’t be enough. He’d go down and the mini ships would outnumber Shiro and Keith. The Castle of Lions would be left to defend itself. Zarkon would come and—

A spear of ice lanced along Red’s back. She shook it off along with the sticky grenades, which exploded in the air below her. “Keith,” Lance said. “You did it!”

“Yeah.” Keith sounded a little breathless. “Yeah, I did. It was like you said.”

Lance whooped as Keith iced up two more mini ships. “Risk it for the biscuit!”

“What does that even—you know what, never mind.”

Lance and Shiro took out the final two with Keith aiming for any grenades the ships fired. By the time they cleared everything out, Pidge and Hunk had returned to the air.

“Did we do it for real this time?” Hunk said.

Coran’s voice came over the comms. “We’re not detecting any more ships. Giving you the all clear.”

“Thank fuck for that,” Pidge said, ignoring Shiro’s chastising grumble.

&&&

They all but fell out of their lions. Keith stretched, hearing both shoulders pop, and made a mental note to show Lance some exercises to help with that. Shiro was doing the rounds, making sure everyone was okay after the battle.

“That was some nice shooting out there,” he said. “Cut it a little close, though.”

Keith rubbed the back of his neck. “Yeah, I was having trouble activating the ice beam. Lance, he—he helped.”

Shiro squeezed his shoulder. “I’m sure he did.” He gave Keith one of those terrible, knowing smiles, and Keith remembered how easily emotions showed on Lance’s face. “Let me know if there are any other issues you need help with.”

Keith rolled his eyes. “Yeah, alright.” He gave Shiro a half-hearted push. “Go tell Allura about those new ships we have to watch out for.”

Shiro grinned, but followed Keith’s suggestion and joined Hunk and Pidge as they left the hanger.

A mental tug from the Blue Lion made Keith hang back. “Thanks,” he said to her. “I should have listened to you earlier.” A buzz of amusement followed a nudge from her. Keith glanced over his shoulder and saw Lance loitering at the hanger door. Cursing both older brother-figures and giant sentient robots, he muttered, “I’ll let him know, too.”

The grin Lance shot him as Keith fell into step beside him filled his chest with warmth. “Did you see us back there? We were all _pew, pew, pew_ and then they were like _bang, bang_ and you were all ‘not today, asshole,’ _fzzt, fzzt.”_

“‘Fzzt?’” Keith asked.

“Well, how would you describe Blue’s ice?”

Keith smiled, then ducked his head. “Thanks. For back there. With the ice.”

“Anytime,” Lance said breezily. “You would have done the same for me.” He gave Keith a searching look. “How’d you get her to let you in, by the way?”

Keith rubbed at a tiny scuff mark on his armour. The Blue Lion was the optimistic one, yes, but he hadn’t expected her to be demanding _._ Red wanted to know how far you would go to protect your people; Blue wanted to know how far you trusted those same people. “She wanted—she asked if I would trust her with myself.” He gave an awkward little laugh. “She wanted to see what Not-Lance looked like behind the barriers.”

Lance blinked. “Like, mentally? She wanted into your head?”

“Yeah. It was hard, letting her in like that.” He looked at Lance, seeing his own grey eyes staring back at him. “Did she do that to you?”

“I—huh.” Lance looked like he came to a realization. “I guess so. When we found her on Earth, she said, ‘Trust me,’ and I went, ‘Okay,’ and that was it. I didn’t really think about it.”

A smile crept onto Keith’s face before he could stop it. “That sounds like you.”

“What, that I didn’t think about it?” Lance puffed out his chest, ready for an argument.

“No, that you trusted her so easily.” Keith paused. “I have a hard time doing that.”

A heavy silence fell between them as they walked. Why would he say that? Trust Lance’s mouth to let things like that fall out.

“Well,” Lance said, “you managed it this time.” He bumped shoulders with Keith. “And it wasn’t too bad, right?”

Keith huffed a laugh. “I guess not if it meant she could blow up those little ships.”

“Mini ships,” Lance said.

Sensing a challenge, Keith said, “Shiplets?”

“Shippettes,” countered Lance. “Oh, I like that one.” As they walked on to the bridge, Lance spread his arms out. “Alright, everyone, those irritations we met out there are officially called shippettes, no take-backs.”

“What, no,” Pidge argued. “We’re calling them I.P.O.S.s: Independent Pieces of Ship.”

“You only like that because it’s an acronym, and it sounds like a swear word. Why don’t you call them Independent Ship Quiznaks?”

“That’s not really how that word works,” Coran tried to interject.

Keith went to stand beside Shiro and Allura, who both wisely stayed out of the other paladins’ argument. Shiro looked caught between amusement and exasperation.

“We have a saying on Earth,” he said. “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Allura smiled. “At least we know they are secure in their identities. Some people can get lost in the neural reassignment.”

“What do you mean?” Keith asked.

Catching the worry in his voice, she said, “You will still all revert to your proper mind maps. What I mean is that people can get caught up in it. Strong emotions from—what did Pidge call it? The host body?—can sometimes override the driving mind. It can be difficult to determine from where the emotion is originating and be very confusing.”

“I could have Lance’s feelings instead of my own?”

Allura shrugged, a gesture she had picked up from the paladins. “It’s rare, but possible. I would not worry about it.” She cocked her head. “Why? Have you been experiencing his emotions?”

The princess had been working on her poker face, if her look of mild interest was anything to go by. Shiro, on Allura’s other side, hadn’t. His eyes shot to Keith’s before he took a sudden interest in what Hunk was saying about categorizing the ships, the tips of his ears turning red.

“Well...” Keith thought of his body’s instinctual reactions to the others; his natural sway towards Hunk, his trust in Shiro, his camaraderie with Pidge. Any of it could have come from Keith himself, but through Lance, it was all stronger and closer to the surface.

He had taken for granted that he would experience Lance’s emotions and was prepared to deal with his lingering attraction to Allura. Looking at her now, Keith could feel it in his chest as a habitual, half-remembered kind of longing. But it was nothing like the spasm that shook him yesterday. He had no idea that it might not be a regular symptom.

“I think. Occasionally,” he said finally. He went to rub away the discomfort under his sternum and knocked against his chest plate instead.

Allura saw the motion and said, “It is nothing to worry about. In fact, the few who experience such overlaps generally gain a better understanding of others.”

“Right,” he said, still considering the disparity.

“Keith,” Lance called. “We won!”

They all looked up at him. Lance had his foot up on his console chair like a triumphant hero while Pidge and Hunk leaned and sprawled respectively against theirs.

“Won what?” Keith asked.

“The naming rights.” Lance ticked off his fingers. “Hunk named the robeasts, Pidge named the BLIP Tech, so we get to name the shippettes. Look, there’s even a prize.” He lifted the crown of purple flowers from his chair. “Pidge made this for me earlier, but it’d be a shame to waste it without seeing it on the real me.” He bounded over and made Keith bend down like he was accepting a medal.

Keith touched the delicate blossoms and the smell of red licorice wafted through the air. He glanced over at Shiro, who shrugged in a _just go with it_ way, so he struck what he thought was a very Lance pose: one hand resting on a cocked hip, the other framing his chin with his thumb and index finger. “What do you think?”

Lance made a high-pitched shriek that Keith didn’t know his body could even produce. He pointed to Keith and turned back to Hunk. “Look, he’s learning! I’m so proud. Wait.” A sharp swivel back to Keith. “Does this mean you’re going to take over my body? You’ve realized what an upgrade it is and you refuse to give it back.”

“Lance,” Keith said, chuckling despite himself. Coming down from the adrenaline rush of the battle followed by Lance’s sincerity earlier had lowered Keith’s barriers. “I don’t want your body.” Everyone paused and turned to Keith, who belatedly realized what he said. “No, I mean—I don’t want—ugh.” He covered his face with his hands as Lance cackled about him being a gold digger.

Later that night, Keith put the flower crown on his desk—Lance’s desk—and fell asleep to the smell of red licorice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I laughed like an idiot writing most of this.


	3. Chapter 3

The morning of their last day in the wrong bodies, Lance woke with a lump in his throat.

When he used to get anxious or too wrapped up in his head, he would make a list. First, he checked in with himself physically and broke down the ways his body was reacting. Next was his emotional state, and last was his mental. It helped him identify what the issue was and deal with it.

So when he felt his heart beating low and deep in his chest and his jaw aching from clenching it all night, he started listing.

The mental aspect Lance knew was his. Leftover anxiety from the battle was standard and nothing jumped out at him as particularly worrisome. The physical was also straightforward: Keith’s body was stressed. It wasn’t a sharp, panicky kind of stress. It was more ingrained, like it had seeped into Keith’s bones.

That left emotional. If his hypothesis was right, and he was getting Keith’s feelings, then it discounted Lance’s emotional state. Logically, Lance was fine. He was safe and so were his friends and family. He had no reason to feel this dragged down.

Lance picked through everything he could think of to identify what was happening. The way his skin felt heavy. The way his limbs were sluggish. The way his eyes were drier than usual. Lance had felt these things before in his own body and stared at the ceiling as he tried to find a name for it.

When he did, he rejected it out of hand, but it niggled at his mind until he couldn’t ignore it.

Keith was lonely.

 _Holy shit._ Lance rubbed the pads of his fingers against his thumb as he turned this over in his mind. Yeah, they were homesick and had people to miss. But what Keith said yesterday made it seem like he would rather be out here than on Earth. What was Keith missing?

Lance sighed. He didn’t want this responsibility. He wanted to wake up tomorrow in his own body with his own problems and only remember this when he was writing his memoirs. But it was like seeing someone drop their wallet; now that he knew, he had to do something about it.

He rolled out of bed and got dressed, hoping to catch Hunk or Pidge before they got stuck in some project for hours. But when he wandered into the common room, whom he found was Allura, talking to the mice.

“They what?” she said to them. “Oh, she won’t be happy about that. I’ve never seen someone so protective of their technology. Hm?” She turned to Lance, alerted by the mice. “Good morning. I was catching up with the mice here.”

“Gossiping, more like,” he said as he sat beside her. She allowed the point with a nod of her head.

“They help keep me informed of what my crew are doing.” Her smile was pure mischief. “Speaking of which, you must be getting tired of this.” She gestured to Lance’s body.

“It’s alright.” He flexed his fingers, noting the tiny scar at the bottom of Keith’s thumb. “I mean, it’s not as weird as I thought it would be. It’s also not as fun.” He wrinkled his nose.

Allura had the grace to not laugh outright at him. “It’s not something people undertake lightly, despite what Coran has implied.”

Lance gave her a side-eye and wondered about her teenage years. “You ever do it?”

Her eyes widened. “Ancients, no. I had a flexible upbringing, but I was still the Princess of Altea.”

Oh, right. Sometimes Lance forgot Allura had had a whole life before the Castle of Lions. If anyone understood loneliness, it was a lost princess sitting here talking to mice because there was no one else.

“What would people use the body-swap thing for, then?”

Allura shrugged. One mouse—Plachu?—scrambled to not get thrown off her shoulder. “Novelty, mostly. Sometimes to experience another person’s life. You have a saying about feet about it.”

“Walk a mile in their shoes,” Lance said with a smile.

“That’s the one. Some people wanted to feel closer to their partners.”

Lance held a hand out to the yellow mouse, Platt, who curled up in his palm. “By partners, you mean...?”

“Life partners. Although, a few professional partners did it, too, to learn what the other’s strengths and weaknesses were. They could then better compensate for them.”

“Oh, like Keith’s weird eyesight. I get that.” Platt yawned, showing off absurdly sharp teeth. “Anything else?”

Allura gave him a side-eye in return, then listened to the chattering mouse on her shoulder. Lance had a feeling they were talking about him.

She turned back. “I saw how Keith’s instincts kicked in when you were sparring with Shiro. That’s rare.”

“Is it?” he asked, his stomach dropping. He didn’t want this to be stranger than it already was.

Allura softened. “You are an empathetic person, Lance. It’s not a weakness. You likely would have experienced such overrides with anybody you switched with.” She tipped her head. “What _have_ you been experiencing?”

Platt snuffled and rolled over, nearly falling off Lance’s hand. He righted it and stroked its fur until it settled again. “I don’t know how Keith would feel about me knowing this, so you can’t tell him.” He pointed to Plachu on Allura’s shoulder. “Got it?”

“Don’t worry. We will leave that choice to you.”

Lance sighed. “I’ve been getting...feelings, too. Emotional reactions to stuff and this morning, I—he—his body felt lonely. Any idea what it might be about?”

Allura looked to Plachu, who chittered back. The other two mice, content until now to listen from Allura’s lap, also piped up. Platt snored. Finally, Allura said, “Keith is a complicated and private person. I’m not sure there is a simple answer to this.” She listened to the mice. “He wants to reach out. But he is unsure how.”

Lance scrubbed his face. “Great. And here we thought he was happy being the loner. We’ve been unintentionally leaving him out.”

“Lance, listen.” Allura turned bodily to face him. “Keith doesn’t feel left out of the group. The paladins have become his family and he would gladly defend any of you with his life.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” he said. “I’m sure he includes you and Coran in there.”

She smiled. “Granted. But Keith has trouble expressing himself as I am sure you’ve noticed. Perhaps if _someone_ —” She gazed off into the distance in exaggerated contemplation. “—gave him a push, he’d open up more.”

Lance groaned as Allura laughed. “Why’s it always gotta be me?” He was mostly joking. There was a very good reason why it was him.

She cocked a brow at him. “Empathetic person, remember? You understand people better than you think you do.”

He breathed deeply, letting her sincerity settle over him. “Thanks, Allura. We really need to come to you for advice more often.”

“At last, someone has that revelation.” Her smile belied her mocking tone.

“How weird is this body swapping for you?”

She grinned. “I always find it hilarious seeing what catastrophes you all get into. It’s very refreshing.”

“Well, I’m glad we can be so entertaining for you.” He smiled and lifted Platt. “You’re lucky none of the rest of us can understand these little guys, or you’d be in so much trouble.”

“Oh, they would never betray me, right?” The mice in her lap seemed to think it over while Plachu nodded its head.

Lance laughed. “Ah! Feed them space goo one time and they’re all mine.” He petted Platt once more before transferring it into Allura’s hands. “I’d love to stay and chat, but I have some emotional pushing to do.” He grimaced. “That sounded better in my head.”

&&&

Keith was talking to Hunk about upgrades for the lions when he saw Lance storming towards them. “What’d I do now,” he muttered.

With no preamble, Lance pointed to Keith’s jacket and said, “I need that. Now.”

On reflex, Keith tugged the canvas jacket tighter around himself. “Why? You have a perfectly acceptable jacket in your room.”

Lance held up his hand, fingers spread. “One, that crop top you call a jacket puts form way over function. Two, your body gets insanely cold in this castle. And three, it’s my jacket, I can do what I want.”

Keith frowned. “And you took until now to realize that?”

Lance paused, a little twitch under his eye that happened when Keith was stressed. “Can I please have my jacket?” he said in measured tones.

Keith glanced at Hunk, who shrugged, then slipped off the jacket. “Okay, fine.”

“Thank you,” Lance said. He put on the jacket, flipped up the hood, and zipped himself into it.

Then he put his nose to the collar and inhaled.

Behind Lance, Hunk smacked his hand into his face.

“What the hell are you doing?” Keith said.

“I needed to try something. Thanks.” He turned and wandered out of the hanger.

Keith looked to Hunk. “What was that about?”

“I think Lance is trying out the scientific method for the first time.” He adjusted his glasses. “He did the same thing with one of Pidge’s sweaters and my shirts.”

“Wait, he’s going around _sniffing_ people? That’s disgusting.”

Hunk shrugged, then turned back to the Yellow Lion. “Yeah, it’s weird, but who knows why Lance does anything. Especially these days.”

Keith stood beside him. “What do you mean, ‘these days’?”

“Ever since we came to the castleship.” Hunk picked up one type of device, twiddled the dials on it, then discarded it for another one. “His entire world turned upside down. Shiro’s alive, aliens are real, Pidge is a girl, you’re not a dick. You know.” He waved towards another beeping thing. “Hand me that, would you?”

Keith passed it over and watched Hunk hook the beeping thing into what looked like a laptop in an attaché case, which was then plugged into an open panel on the Yellow Lion. “What about you?”

Hunk gave him a quizzical look. “I don’t think I have anything that would surprise him.”

“No, I mean—” Hunk shoved a mess of wires into Keith’s hand that resembled three tv antennas wrapped together. “When we left Earth, how did you cope?”

“Oh.” Hunk adjusted how Keith was holding the antenna. “I guess I had people to look after and problems to solve. Sometimes, when I let myself slow down, it can get hard. I miss home, of course. I’ve asked Allura about sending messages back since the Galra know about Earth _anyway_ , but she said the quieter we can keep it, the safer Earth would be, so...” He trailed off and Keith felt like the aforementioned dick for bringing it up.

“But,” Hunk continued, brightening, “there’s so much here to learn. And I get to help people every day. Whole planets and species of people. Or you guys with things like this.” He held up a tool and beamed at Keith.

Keith returned the smile despite himself. “Thanks, Hunk. Don’t know what we’d do without you.”

“You’d be stuck with Coran’s cooking, Lance’s bad ideas, Pidge’s type-A pedantry, Shiro’s gung-ho attitude, and Allura’s mouse gossip.” Hunk’s smile turned into a smirk. “I know my part.”

Keith laughed. “This is probably some residual Lance, but I’ve got the strongest urge to hug you right now.”

“First, please don’t because I need you to hold that for another three doboshes, and second, that’s not Lance, that’s just everyone’s natural reaction to my charm.” He typed something into the laptop. “Also, you’re welcome. Seems like Lance’s brain has been a good influence on you if you’re this relaxed.”

Keith shifted while also trying to hold the antenna still. “Yeah, I suppose so.”

“Maybe you should hang out with him more often,” Hunk said.

The tv antenna wavered. “I should probably hang out with everyone more often,” Keith said carefully.

“Yeah.” Hunk nudged the antenna back into its original position. “I mean, we’d all welcome more Keith in our lives. But you should hang out with Lance specifically.”

Keith swallowed. He thought of the way his borrowed heart had lurched at ‘Keith’s’ flirtations. “Why?”

Hunk finally broke and levelled one of Pidge’s best _do not bullshit me_ glares at him. “Because you’re more relaxed around him. Because he’s more confident around you. Because you balance each other out. Because you trust each other. Need I go on?”

Keith groaned. Hunk was offering a perfect excuse and Keith couldn’t stop fighting it. “What would we even have in common?”

Hunk’s gaze drifted to rest on the blue and white shirt Keith was wearing. “Well, you have at least one thing now. Start with this. You can put that down, by the way.”

Keith’s arm tingled as he lowered the antenna. He opened his mouth to say something—probably another argument—when Coran’s voice over the intercom interrupted him.

“All displaced paladins to the med bay for scans!”

Hunk and Keith looked at each other with matching long-suffering expressions. Coran had insisted on daily neurological scans to make sure they were progressing as normal. It wouldn’t have been so bad if Coran didn’t also insist on running the full gamut of Altean tests, including a strange one to do with elbows.

Hunk put away his equipment as Keith toyed with the cuff of his shirt, worn soft with wear. “Maybe...maybe you’re right.”

“Need you to narrow it down, buddy.”

“About being around people more.” At Hunk’s pointed look, Keith added. “Around Lance.” He huffed in frustration, trying to find something—anything—that would make this a bad idea. “What if he tries to sniff me or something again?”

Hunk grinned. “No promises, dude.”

&&&

It took Pidge to ask what they should have thought of the first day. The four of them sat around as Coran placed a net of wires over Pidge’s head, the last one of them to be scanned. “If it’s our mind maps that got transferred, will we remember any of this once we’re back to normal?” she asked.

Lance hadn’t thought of that. As awkward as these past few days had been, he didn’t want to forget them. There had been good moments: flying the Red Lion, or Keith saying the Blue Lion reminded him of Lance. Those soft looks Keith gave him yesterday morning.

Out of habit, Lance lifted a hand to rub at his chest. He stopped when he saw Keith do the same thing. He—or Lance’s body, at least—was also feeling apprehensive.

Coran tapped a few things on his datapad. “I should think so. Alteans always kept their memories, which made for some humourous encounters after the party.” He laughed, but stopped at Pidge’s flat expression. “Anyway, anything you gain should transfer back. If we’re still using the computer processing metaphor, then the transferred mind map and the original brain continually sync up, and the map that returns to the brain is the most up-to-date one.”

Keith spoke. “So we get to keep our memories? Everything we’ve learned?”

“Indeed,” said Coran.

“Good.” Keith stood. “There’s something I want to try. Lance?” He stood by the door, waiting.

Lance sat frozen until Hunk elbowed him. “Am I going to be a guinea pig for this unknown something?”

“No.” Keith tilted his head. “Not really.”

With a grimace, Lance followed. He turned back to Hunk and whispered, “If this gets weird, it’s your fault.”

Both Pidge and Hunk gave him a thumbs-up.

Lance’s misgivings grew as he followed Keith to the training deck. Keith had activated the blue bayard into the high-tech bayonet. “You are not going to William Tell me,” Lance said.

“No. I want you to teach me how to use it.”

Lance’s head shot around to Keith so fast he felt his neck crack. “What? _Me_ teach _you?_ ”

Keith shrugged like it was no big deal. “You’re our sharpshooter and you’re the best. I want to learn how to shoot while in your body so I can remember how to do it better in mine.”

 _You’re the best_ echoed in Lance’s head and he tried to play off how brightly that burned through him. “I guess that makes sense. Especially now you have my eagle eyes.”

Keith snorted. “If by eagle eyes, you mean they’re crap at night, then yeah.”

“You’re one to talk. Everything looks dull through your eyes. Sorry to be the one to break it to you, but your leather jacket is _not_ as subtle as you think it is.”

“I can see colour. You just see too much of it.” His mouth quirked in a half-smile. “I can see why Blue likes your head so much.”

This was not how Lance thought today would go. He threw up his hands. “And on that weird comment, we get back to training.” Clearing his throat, he gestured to Keith. “Okay, show me your stance.”

Keith braced the rifle against his shoulder in one smooth motion. It was Garrison-level quality, but none of them was at that level anymore. Lance worried his lip and walked around Keith, making tiny adjustments. “Put your foot further back. Relax your shoulders. Lower your chin.” He made Keith go from at-ease to shooting stance over and over until Keith got it.

The satisfied smile Lance wore was echoed on Keith. “Good,” Lance said. “Now for the real work.” He called up a set of stationary targets to stand at various distances down the deck. “The bayard doesn’t have as much kickback as the Garrison rifles, so you won’t have to brace for it. But it has a delicate trigger. Try it out. Squeeze it—”

“Don’t jerk it.” Keith smirked at him. “I’m not a complete beginner.”

Lance needed to have a serious chat with currently-his-formerly-Keith’s limbic system when this was finished. It was going haywire at the sight of physically-Lance-mentally-Keith grinning over the stock of a gun. _This is so messed up._ “Could’ve fooled me with the way you’re standing stiff as a board,” he said. “You gotta _relax._ Here.” He stepped behind Keith and placed his fingers on a spot between Keith’s shoulder blades Lance knew always tensed before a shot. “Focus on relaxing here.”

Lance kept his fingers in place to feel Keith take a deep breath and let it out slowly. At the end of the exhale, he pulled the trigger. A laser blast hit the lower right quadrant of the nearest target.

“Not bad,” Lance said. “Do it again. Slowly and focus on your breathing.”

Keith had taken three more shots before Lance realized his fingers were still on Keith’s back. He hurriedly stepped to the side to watch Keith fire from the new angle.

“The barrel is dipping a little,” Lance said. “It’s why you’re not getting closer to the centre. Try it again?” Keith took a few more shots. “Mmhmm, I see it. You’re rushing the exhale and it’s jerking the gun. Right here—” He reached out without thinking and put his hand on Keith’s chest.

Keith remained composed, but his heart rate did not.

Lance’s brain shorted out. He knew what that meant, _he fucking knew it._ Lance knew his body like, well, the back of his hand. He knew what happened when he felt scared, or anxious, or excited. What happened when he picked up a gun. Whenever he felt that weight in his hands, his body relaxed. It was better than meditation or drugs. Everything slowed down, and Lance’s heart rate always remained steady. This? This was not about the gun.

It confirmed what the sniff test had suggested earlier. To Lance, his own scent didn’t mean much of anything. But to Keith’s nose, the smell of Lance’s jacket lit up all sorts of reactions. He had tested the theory out on everyone, even barging into Shiro’s room and taking a violent inhale as Shiro asked what the hell was going on. Shiro smelled safe, but Lance’s scent was _exciting, scary, home_ in a way the others were not. Lance had only wanted to learn which person Keith felt most comfortable to open up to; clearly, this went far deeper.

Which was a pretty weird thing to discuss in the middle of the most terrible moment of clarity in Lance’s life. _Hey, remember when I sniffed your clothes earlier? It was because I think you see me as a close friend, or maybe more, and that’s why you feel lonely and I need to push you off your emotional cliff for you to see that. And guess what? I might also be receptive to this more-than-friends thing if you actually came out and asked me. Surprise!_

Keith swallowed.

“Kinda hard to shoot between heartbeats when it sounds like a rabbit on coke,” Lance said. “Something you want to tell me?”

Keith stared at him over the gun, still in a perfect stance. Lance saw the decision flicker through his eyes before he blurted, “Hunk and I broke into Pidge’s computer and changed her alerts to duck quacks.”

The misdirection was so far from what Lance expected that he took it at face value. He rocked back and dropped his hand. “Oh, my god. She will kill you.”

Keith relaxed, deactivating the bayard. “I know. I hope she’s back to her regular size before she finds out.”

Lance laughed and let the moment pass. There would be other moments. He would make sure of it.

He grabbed his own bayard. “Tit for tat, my man. Except I don’t think I’ll need as much tutoring as you did.” He pushed his hair back into one of Allura’s hair ties—a complicated combination of elastic and comb—and activated the rapier. “I got your reflexes.”

Keith stared at him, and Lance wondered if his face was always that open. Then Keith smiled. “Oh, it’s on.”

“First to take out ten drones wins!”

&&&

Dinner was casual, something Keith was grateful for after his failed training-slash-hangout attempt. Sort-of failed. He had learned better technique and narrowly snagged a victory in taking out drones. But when Lance had put a hand to his chest and asked why his heart rate was so high, Keith panicked. _He_ didn’t know what was happening, so why did Lance seem like he did? Keith had been turning over Allura’s words all day. What did it mean that he was reacting so strongly? If he could pin down where it was coming from, it would make it so much easier. Was Keith reacting to Lance? Or was it a more thrilling and terrifying reason—Lance’s body reacting to Keith’s body?

He grimaced. He wished they had better terms for shit like this.

Shiro noticed. He sat beside Keith reading on his datapad. It looked like serious business, but Keith knew it was the Olkarian equivalent of the gossip rags. “Something on your mind?” he asked.

They were the only ones left in the dining hall. Coran had promised they would switch back within the next four vargas, and Pidge had run off to be a tall menace while she could. Hunk went back to the hangers to crawl around in the lions, Lance left to hit things with his sword, and Allura left after an unsubtle nod from Shiro.

“No,” Keith said to see what tactic Shiro would use.

“You sure?” He didn’t even look up. “Because you’ve solved that puzzle seventeen times now.”

Keith stuffed the little wooden pieces back into his pocket. “It’s fine.”

Shiro swiped to a new page. “Nothing to do with what Allura said yesterday?”

Keith groaned. Fake Naïve Shiro was the worst kind. Both he and Shiro knew it sapped Keith’s patience faster than anything. “It’s fine,” he said again with more force. “In four hours, it’ll be done and I can get back to my life.”

Shiro hummed.

When Keith found himself taking apart the wooden puzzle while it was still in his pocket, he slammed his hands on the table. “Lance’s body has a heart attack every time he sees me.”

Putting the datapad aside, Shiro turned to him and said, “Okay. Talk it out.”

Keith rubbed at his chest. “Everything feels so much bigger as Lance, and then he comes in wearing my face—and he’s just being Lance, so it shouldn’t be so—but every time he does something that’s _him,_ it feels like a vice in my chest and _I don’t know what’s happening._ ”

“Wow.” Shiro sat back in his chair and rubbed a hand through his hair. “Well. I mean, that sounds a lot like—”

“I know what it sounds like.” As mentioned before, Keith wasn’t an idiot. “But I can’t tell who it’s coming from.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?” Shiro held his hands out, every inch the friend trying to find the positive in a bad situation.

“No, it isn’t. Because what if it’s only me? And not—” He couldn’t even say it. “This is so stupid.”

Shiro refused to let him brush this off. “Keith, I know you see a lot more of what’s going on than you say you do. Are you _sure_ it’s only you?”

“I—he’s just acting like Lance! Like he does every day.”

“Yeah, around _you._ Around everyone else, he’s a little more melancholy.”

“How do you know?”

Shiro looked away, the tips of his ears turning pink. “Those space mice can be very helpful.”

“You’ve been _spying_ on us?”

“It’s not like you tell me anything!”

They glared at each other. Keith broke first, grinning at Shiro’s mock-offended expression.

Shiro chuckled. “Can you blame us? We were worried about the effect this body switching would have on you guys.” Mischief gleamed in his eyes. “Who do you think suggested the daily neural scans?”

Keith punched him in the shoulder. “You’re worse than Allura and Hunk put together.”

Shiro fended off Keith’s hits, and the whole thing devolved into a childish slap fight. “It worked, didn’t it?” Shiro said when he finally caught both of Keith’s wrists in his right hand. “You had a problem, and now we’re talking.”

Despite knowing Lance would kill him if he left bruises on his body, Keith made a show of struggling. “I’m no closer to an answer, though, am I?”

“Keith.” Shiro paused until Keith looked at him. He released Keith’s hands and said, “I think you know who has the answer.”

His borrowed heart froze. “What if I don’t want it?”

Shiro’s brows drew together, but he affected a casual attitude a moment later. “Maybe you’re right and it’s all down to the body switching. Lance has been acting a little off since this thing started, too. He tried to smell me today.” Shiro’s mouth twisted in confusion.

“Yeah, me too. Hunk said something about Lance trying the scientific method.”

“What does that—oh.” Shiro’s face cleared. His eyes darted across the table as he put unknown pieces together. “Oh.”

“What?”

Shiro flapped a hand at him. “Go talk to him. Ask him about it. Information from the source is better than conjecture, anyway.”

Keith scowled, but stood and walked out of the room. Better to face it now than have Shiro keep asking about it. Gossipy old hen.

&&&

Lance was on the training deck still fighting drones, still with his hair pulled back.

Keith watched him from the side, hidden by the equipment racks. Lance had apparently taken Pidge’s comment about stabbing with the rapier to heart; he jabbed and parried at the drones, making a successful hit maybe once every three strikes. His accuracy failed only because he felt the need to make elaborate twirls and flourishes any chance he got.

 _But then he wouldn’t be as much fun to watch._ Keith fisted his hands and ignored the way his pulse kicked up.

When Lance finished off the last drone, Keith stepped out. “You’re actually not terrible with that thing,” he said.

Lance grinned. “Hell, yeah, I’m not. Makes me think I should get a sword of my own just to kick your ass with it.” He brandished the rapier and said in a too-serious voice, “I am not left-handed.”

Keith frowned. “Yeah.” He lifted his hands. “I’ve been using them for three days.”

“C’mon, Keith,” Lance groaned. “Throw a guy a bone here. Also, gross.” He deactivated the bayard and swept the tie out of his hair, letting it fall around his face. Some of it stuck to the sweat at his temple.

Keith’s heart refused to calm down.

“What can I do you for, my man?” Lance said. “Are the Terror Twins being insufferable again?”

“No, it’s—” A nervousness that was all Keith buzzed along his skin. He crossed his arms. “I actually had a question. For you.”

Lance stilled as only a sharpshooter could. “Okay. Let me grab a drink and we can talk.”

They wandered to where Lance had dropped his stuff. He flopped next to his jacket and ripped open the foil pouch. Using it to gesture in front of him, Lance said, “Sit down. It won’t kill you to relax.” He smiled. “Trust me.”

It was an echo of what he said yesterday, and Keith wondered if Lance knew exactly what he had come to ask. He sat cross-legged in front of Lance and rubbed a hand through his hair. Normally, Lance had a habit of letting out whatever he was thinking and for once, Keith hoped the instinct proved true.

“Why were you sniffing people earlier?” he said.

_That's one way to start._

Lance’s eyes bugged out, and he choked on the water. Coughing and pounding on his chest, he managed to croak, “What?”

“The thing with the jacket.” Why was Lance staring like Keith was the weird one? “Both Hunk and Shiro said you were smelling everyone’s clothes.”

“Yeah, that.” Lance scratched at the back of his neck. “Would you believe me if I said it was Allura’s idea?”

Keith crossed his arms. “No.”

“Fair enough. I mean, it wasn’t her idea per se, but she gave me the idea for the idea. You follow?”

“Not really.”

Lance groaned and scrubbed at his face. He paused for a long moment, then looked at Keith. “Okay, I’m going to be really upfront about this because, at this stage, there’s no real point in keeping secrets.”

Keith’s stomach knotted up. “Okay.”

“I know you feel lonely.”

It took a moment for Keith to comprehend what Lance said. “What?”

Lance thumped himself on the chest. “I’ve been riding around in here for three days, and even though I didn’t want to, I picked up on that background, hindbrain stuff. So I _know_ how you feel when you see the rest of us hanging out. I _know_ you want more than what you have now. Don’t bother denying it.”

Keith tried to think past the alarm bells in his head. “And you thought sniffing people would help?”

“It was the only way I had to make sure you were honest.” Lance’s voice dropped. “Smell is the strongest sense tied to memory. Ever smell, like, woodsmoke and remember a fun camp out or something?”

 _Or something._ Clearing his throat, Keith said, “Yeah.”

Lance shrugged. “So, I did an experiment. Allura said maybe getting forced out of your comfort zone would help you actually connect with people, and you would probably be traumatized if I set Hunk on you without explanation.” He smirked, and Keith huffed a startled laugh at the thought of Hunk’s enthusiasm at the challenge. Lance continued. “I wanted to know who you felt most comfortable with. Who would be safe enough to push at you without you retreating further.” He glanced down and toyed with a worn spot on his jeans. “Surprise, surprise, it was me.”

Keith wanted to punch him. He wanted to rail against everyone who led him to this conversation; Shiro for encouraging it; Hunk for suggesting it; even Allura for noticing it in the first place. Keith’s skin felt cold and prickly, and he pushed his fists into his thighs to stop them from shaking.

He did the only thing he could think of to distract from this.

“And what about you?” he said. Lance frowned at him. “What about how I’m riding around in _your_ hindbrain?”

“I don’t—”

“For three days, I’ve had your insecurities clamouring up my head. You say I need pushing? That I feel I don’t belong? Take a look in the mirror, Lance. Maybe fix yourself before you go trying to fix everyone else.”

He expected an outburst like the other day in Keith’s room. He expected another loud but ultimately meaningless fight. He didn’t expect Lance to shut down and have nothing but ice radiating off him.

“We’re going there, huh?” he said. “Fine. Turnabout’s fair play, I guess.” He reached behind him, and Keith thought he was leaving. Instead, Lance tossed Keith’s red leather jacket into Keith’s lap. “Here.”

“What is this?”

Lance shrugged, cold and uncaring. “You’re in my body. See what it tells you.”

It was too much. “You want me to _smell_ it?”

Lance did stand up at that point. “You know what? It doesn’t matter. Just trying to be honest here.” He stalked away to the control board at the far side of the room.

“Got a funny way of showing it,” Keith muttered. He lifted the jacket. It wasn’t any different from three days ago. What was Lance hoping to accomplish by this?

But Lance was the sharpshooter for a reason. He stepped back and saw the whole picture before anyone else. Maybe Keith was still too close to see it.

He breathed in.

The scent of leather was the strongest, and underneath was the murky, oily scent of human. It was Keith’s scent through Lance’s nose, and it felt like a new spectrum of colour. It felt like family, and home, and comfort. Keith wanted to wrap himself in that smell and fall asleep. His borrowed, treacherous heart calmed down.

He jerked the jacket away. “What the hell?”

The answer was there, but he didn’t want to see it. He rubbed at his sternum, trying to put the pieces together. It was too much, too beyond, too strange.

But really, he had known all along, hadn’t he?

Keith stood and walked over to where Lance was glaring at the program control board. He had changed the settings so there were multiple opponents, but they were a foot high. “What?” Lance said without turning.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. It was a really shitty thing to say. Especially since…” Keith stalled, hands shoved in his pockets.

“Since?” Lance had turned his head to look over his shoulder, but his back was still a rigid line.

 _Don’t make me say it._ “Especially since...you don’t feel out of place around me.” He stared at the ground. “I should have addressed it sooner, but I didn’t want, I don’t know, the responsibility? No, that sounds terrible. It’s like you said, I didn’t want to mess things up and make you feel worse.” He saw Lance’s shoes shift. “I’ve known for a couple days. Since talking to Blue, really. Plus the shit that comes with being in your body.” He cringed. “That will never not sound gross.”

“So gross,” Lance said.

Lance’s voice was low enough that Keith risked a glance up. Seeing his own sharp grey eyes hold Lance’s softness was still a shock. He felt lightheaded.

“What about the other stuff?” Lance said.

“Other…?”

“You know.” Lance reached out and put three fingers to Keith’s chest, right where he touched him during the rifle training. “That other stuff.”

Had the training deck always been so hot? Keith’s breath came in short puffs, but this wasn’t like his earlier weird attacks. “I don’t—I don’t know.”

Lance frowned again. “Don’t play dumb now. My body wouldn’t have reacted like that because of a gun. You _have_ to know what I mean.”

“I know your body goes crazy every time I interact with you.” What was he doing? He needed to leave. This was getting too close. “Maybe it’s not me. Maybe it’s all from you.”

Lance paused, sighed, dropped his fingers. “Maybe it is.”

Keith’s eyes shot to Lance’s even as his vision blurred. “That’s—no, don’t.”

Lance stepped closer. “I’ve been in your head. You’ve been in mine. I _know_ how I react to you. Let me guess.” He reached out as if to touch Keith’s chest again, but stopped before he made contact. “The first day when I flirted with you in the kitchen, you thought you were having a heart attack.”

Keith stared at him. This was spiralling wildly out of control. “Arrhythmia, actually.”

“You know how I know? Because I feel everything in my chest first. Anxiety, apprehension, affection. Attraction. A lot of other ‘A’ words.”

“Stop it.”

“ _You know me._ Stop pretending this isn’t what it is.”

“And what is it?” Keith asked. It came out as a challenge. He didn’t know what he wanted the answer to be.

“This is you being honest for once.”

Keith scowled even as he swayed forward. “I don’t know what you want from me.”

“I want—oh, shit.” Lance caught Keith as Keith’s knees buckled and propped him against the control board. “Keith? You okay? What happened?”

Keith’s vision swam as he looked into Lance’s—no, his own—no, _Lance’s_ face. Lance with concerned blue eyes and messy brown hair.

A sensation like his ears popping settled the double vision, and full-body goosebumps raced over his skin. He looked at the black t-shirt and jeans he was wearing, then lifted his hands from Lance’s shoulders from where Lance caught him. “Did we—are we—”

“I think we switched back,” Lance said, and holy crow, was it good to hear his proper voice again. He watched Keith warily as he leaned against the control board.

Keith swallowed. “We should check on the others. Make sure they’re alright.”

“Yeah.” Lance didn’t move. “Should tell Coran, too.”

“Okay.” They both stood waiting, and Keith couldn’t take it anymore. “What do you want from me?” he repeated.

Lance pushed off the table, and Keith involuntarily stepped back. Lance noticed, but said, “Trust me, Keith. I’m not going to hurt you.” Then he walked away.

Keith waited until he was sure Lance had left the training deck to drop his head in his hands. He groaned as he realized how soft his face felt from Lance’s stupid skincare regime. Fucking idiot was right again.

&&&

Lance stalked down the corridor trying to get his land legs back, so to speak. His limbs felt too long, his body too wild, not to mention how pulled around his insides felt. He’d laid everything out on the table and goddamn Keith—angry, defiant, afraid of surrender—had just stared at him.

Maybe it was all in his head.

“Keith?” Lance looked back. Shiro stood in the doorway to the dining hall. “Did you talk to him about it?”

 _He doesn’t know we’ve switched back._ A terrible part of Lance played along. “Sorry?”

Shiro leaned against the wall. “You wanted to talk to Lance about the whole—” He waved his hand around his chest. “Did he not take it well?”

Lance swallowed. _Oh._ “Well, about that...”

“Wait.” Shiro narrowed his eyes at him and pinned Lance under his searching gaze. “You switched back, didn’t you. You’re back to your own bodies.”

Lance nodded. “Yeah. I was heading up to tell Coran.” They stood there, caught in the awkwardness of the moment. “And no,” Lance said to the floor, “he didn’t take it well.”

“Oh.” Shiro rubbed the back of his neck. “Give him time. He tends to...dwell on things a bit.”

“Sorry, Shiro.”

“You don’t have to apologize for being honest.” He shrugged. “I wish it could have happened under less weird circumstances.”

Lance allowed a smile. “With us, there is no ‘less weird.’”

Shiro laughed. “Isn’t that the truth. C’mon, I’ll join you to see Coran.”

Pidge and Hunk were already in the med bay with Coran when they arrived. “—might feel some nausea for a while, and maybe some hives,” Coran was saying. “But it should pass shortly.”

“Got another one here for you,” Shiro said, pushing Lance forward.

“Excellent,” Coran said, then stuck a thermometer in Lance’s mouth. He hoped it was a thermometer. “We’ll make sure you’ve all snapped back in one piece, and then we can be on our way. Any questions?”

Hunk stuck his hand up. “Yes, I have a question.” He pointed to Pidge. “Why do you wear glasses if you don’t need them? And why are you so sweaty? And why do you hate the best nut in the world?”

Pidge shoved Hunk’s finger out of her face. “Well, I have questions for you, then. Why do you have so many odd socks? And why do you like the smell of rubber?”

Turning to Shiro, Coran said, “Not really what I had in mind, but it’s good to get it out of their system.”

“When did you guys switch back?” Lance mumbled around the thermometer.

“About twenty doboshes ago,” Pidge said. “I woke up literally inside the Green Lion. I thought I had been eaten.”

“I woke up in the middle of pulling all the romance books off the top shelf of the library,” Hunk said as Pidge leapt at him and tried to strangle him with his own headband. Holding her back with one hand, Hunk asked, “What about you?”

Lance glanced at Shiro, then sidestepped the question. “Not too long ago.”

The med bay doors slid open, and Lance nearly swallowed the thermometer as Keith came in wearing the red leather jacket. “Everyone’s back to normal, then?” He directed it to the others, but glanced at Lance as if asking the question to him alone.

“As much as possible,” Pidge said as Coran produced another thermometer for Keith.

Coran gave them a battery of tests, including cognitive ones. All came back clear. Lance grew ever more restless as he kept catching Keith staring at him. “What, missing my face already?” he said because his response to stress was always humour.

“You still have my knife,” Keith said.

Lance twisted around to see the sheath strapped into the small of his back. “Oh, right.” He pulled it off and handed it to Keith, and it felt like the end of something.

Coran warned them they might feel woozy for a while due to the “energy expenditure caused by the cessation of the neural reassignment.” Or something. Lance wasn’t paying attention. He was intensely aware of Keith and not in a good way. For his part, Keith seemed determined to pretend things really were back to normal.

Lance used the excuse of the energy expenditure to head to his room early. He almost walked into Keith’s room before he realized his mistake. There, he took an inventory of himself. Skin and hair were of a quality he expected from someone who didn’t own a brush. Teeth were fine. Nails were fine. A faint bruise was forming on his left wrist. His shoulders felt looser.

It was with a strange disassociation that Lance sat on his bed in his underwear and looked around the room. It was like coming back to a house someone else had been looking after, but left before you returned. The dust was still settling from Keith’s departure.

The scent of red licorice hit his nose. Sitting slightly wilted on his desk was the purple flower crown. Lance stared at it for a long time before finally going to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Does Keith have a gun kink? I think Keith has a gun kink.


	4. Chapter 4

They left the planet of druranus the next morning.

“Good riddance,” Pidge said as the forest fell away from them. “Being tall was not worth also being nauseated at every air pocket we hit.”

“Pidge, I know you’re kidding, but I have to point out that there are _no air pockets in space._ ”

She patted Hunk’s arm. “I know, big guy. If you punks need me, I’ll be in the lab.” She left Hunk and Lance alone in the observation room, the former leaning on the back of a couch and the latter sprawled out over it.

It was like being hungover after a party. They shuffled around, spoke in monotones, and Lance had caught Pidge staring vacantly into space once or twice. Keith had bolted his breakfast and left.

They were quiet as they watched the planet’s two moons go past. “Sort of feels like it never happened, huh?” Hunk said.

“Yeah,” Lance said. “I thought there would be something more to it. Like fireworks or flashing lights, not feeling dizzy and snapping back.” He rubbed at his shirtsleeves. His jacket was still in Keith’s room, something Lance had only remembered that morning. He would have to ask for it back sooner or later. Probably later.

Hunk’s face appeared upside down in Lance’s vision. “What was it like being the boy wonder?”

Lance laced his hands together to keep them from twitching. “It was, you know. Short.”

“I hear you. Being in Pidge’s body was like a horror movie where the hero gets shrunk down and has to fend off insects and stuff. Don’t tell her I said that.”

Grasping for the change of subject, Lance asked, “What was it like, actually? Being a girl?”

“Pidge made me sign a blood oath I would never tell anyone. Literally, with blood and everything.” Hunk held up one bandaged finger, then shrugged. “What can you do?” He came around to the front of the couch to sit beside Lance. “But really, what’s up? You’re moping harder than when you couldn’t go out in that rainstorm because it would melt your skin off.”

Lance rubbed the back of his neck. “Keith and I had an argument right before we switched back, and now things are weird.”

“Uh huh,” Hunk said. “Did it have anything to do with him wanting to spend time with you yesterday?”

“What do you mean? He wanted to train with me, not hang out.”

Hunk gave him a look.

“Oh my god, he wanted to hang out.” Lance dropped his head into his hands. “Why can’t anyone be straightforward?”

“Did he say anything?”

_Too much, not enough._ “Not really,” Lance said.

“You seemed pretty chummy yesterday. I’m sure you guys will work this out.”

Lance lifted his head from his hands. “I...don’t know. I may have pushed him too hard.”

Hunk paused before saying, “You guys will fix this. I believe that.”

Touched, if a bit confused by Hunk’s sincerity, Lance said, “Thanks, man.”

_“Hunk,”_ came Pidge’s voice from down the hall. “What in the ever-loving _fuck_ did you do to my computer?”

Hunk went pale and stood up. “Love to stay and chat, buddy, but I have to hide from a hurricane. See ya!”

As Hunk darted out, Lance heard the sounds of him pleading for mercy and Pidge making a series of graphic and physically improbable threats of harm. Lance left, muttering about people always causing trouble for themselves.

&&&

What Keith said yesterday stuck under Lance’s skin. Maybe he was putting too much effort in trying to fit with what other people were good at. Time to turn the tables.

“I’m going to kick your ass, old man,” Lance said as he picked up the Mercury Game Flux controller. “You have walked into the den of the _Killbot Phantasm 1_ champion.”

“I’m barely older than you,” Shiro protested. “And I seem to remember you dragging me into said den. Hey!” he said as his character got his spine ripped out. “Oh, c’mon! You were cheating.”

“Remembering combos isn’t cheating,” Lance said. “First to ten?”

“Oh, you’re on. I was the king of _Moons of Vocury_ in my Garrison days.” Shiro grinned at him. “No way am I going to let someone win who thinks better graphics automatically means a better game.”

“Excuse me,” Lance said as he shot a wall of fireballs. “Just because I don’t want to play with two-dimensional stick figures like you used to—”

Lance was interrupted by someone clearing their throat. Keith standing in the doorway with Lance’s jacket in his hand. “I can come back later,” he said.

“No, no, come in,” Shiro said before Lance could say anything. He wasn’t sure what, but something.

Keith took two steps inside. “I wanted to return this.” He held out the jacket, too far away for Lance to reach. “It was still in my room from when—when you took it.”

Shiro, sitting between them, looked like he both wanted to say something and be anywhere else. He watched Lance.

Lance got up and walked closer. “Thanks. Been feeling a little lost without all my treasures.”

“I can’t believe you can still move with all that crap weighing you down,” Keith said. His smile flickered and faded.

Lance was tempted to smell the jacket again just to freak Keith out, but the poor guy would probably have an aneurysm. He slipped it on instead. “Here, take one for the road.” He pushed a small puzzle made of interlocking metal loops into Keith’s hands.

“Thanks, I—thanks,” Keith stuttered. Blinking like a stunned deer, he turned and left.

Lance sat down beside Shiro and said gruffly, “Another round?”

Shiro waited a moment before saying, “Sure.”

The silence lasted another three rounds until Shiro said, “He’s had a lot of people leave him. His family. The Garrison. Me.”

“I know.” Lance didn’t look at Shiro.

“He’ll come around,” Shiro said firmly. “Uncertainty bothers him, so he won’t be able to leave a problem alone for long. He just has to figure out how to solve it.”

“He can solve it by telling me I’m not crazy,” Lance said. He faced Shiro. “I’m not crazy, right? You talked to him. I’m right, aren’t I?”

Shiro started to say something several times. Finally, he sighed and said, “He doesn’t really know what to do with it.”

“I can tell him what to do with it,” Lance burst out. “Although, I’m tempted to tell him he can stick it straight up his—”

“Okay, calm down, champ. It’s been a freaky few days. Maybe do something normal.” At Lance’s incredulous look, Shiro added, “Normal for us.” He held up the controller. “Now, pick that industrial stage. I want a challenge.”

“You asked for it.”

But it didn’t have the ease of before. Seeing Keith had awakened the mess of their fight. _Take a look in the mirror, Lance._

“Hey, Shiro,” he said during a lull in the game. “Am I—do I—jeez, this sounds so stupid.”

“When you’re ready,” Shiro said, and Lance got the idea that the other man had been expecting this.

“What am I? Not just the blue paladin or the sharpshooter or anything like that, but what am I to the team? To you guys?”

Shiro turned all his attention on Lance, and Lance fidgeted as Shiro mulled the question over. This was why he went to Shiro first. Lance knew the others would all give honest answers, but Shiro tended to look beyond the surface to the motive underneath.

“You’re the heart of us,” Shiro said finally. “Remember when Allura first assigned us our lions and said the Yellow Lion supported the team? That’s not just Hunk; that’s you, too. How many times have you helped us out just by talking and listening to us? We would fall apart without you.”

Lance wished he could leave it at that. But. “I get what you’re saying, and I appreciate it, I really do. But what am I when there’s no one there to support? A scaffold’s kinda useless without a building to prop up.”

To his surprise, Shiro smiled. “That is a perfect example why you’re important. You don’t accept easy answers. You’re innovative, and no one can change you without your permission. You’re like a catalyst; you help change others while remaining true to yourself. That takes a lot of strength.”

Lance looked away and sniffed. “Wow, that was a lot heavier than I was expecting.”

“Is it as heavy as my war hammer to your face?”

“What?” Lance looked up in time to see Shiro’s character on-screen pulverize Lance’s into the dirt.

He gasped in mock affront. “Now who’s cheating? You take advantage of my emotional vulnerability to defeat me? They warned me about the wiles of the elderly.”

“That’ll teach you to take your eyes off the prize.”

Lance glanced over at him. “Thanks, Shiro.”

“Any time, bud.”

&&&

Keith turned the metal puzzle over and over. He was thinking of solving the puzzles with Lance’s hands. Lance, who had amazing dexterity and long fingers.

Keith shoved the puzzle back in his pocket.

He was sitting against the wall in a random corridor near the pool. Whenever he entered a room today, someone was already there. Hunk was in the hanger, Pidge and Allura were in the lab, and Lance and Shiro—

Keith cringed. There was too much push and pull for him to make sense of his own feelings. This much turmoil couldn’t have existed three days ago. But Lance had reached in—literally—and forced this stuff to the surface. Keith wanted to put it back.

But then he thought of Lance’s expression from earlier: wary, waiting, patient. He was afraid of pushing Keith away, and now Keith had made Lance think he’d done just that.

Keith’s hands idly played with the metal puzzle.

Pulling away would hurt both of them. Lance had the good grace to talk around Keith’s loneliness and made it sound more generalized, but they both knew who Keith was lonely for.

Keith also remembered the hesitation in Lance’s chest and how it went away around him.

The sound of whistling broke through Keith’s rumination. Coran passed by the end of the corridor, and Keith scrambled to catch up.

“Coran, hey,” Keith said. Coran was carrying a box of colourful chunks of plastic. “Need a hand with anything?”

“Why, thank you, Keith. I was taking these data sticks down to the archives. You could help file them. It’s all the medical data we collected from your neural reassignments. Fascinating stuff.”

“Oh, yeah?” They turned a corner and Coran pressed a hand to a sensor. A door that Keith had never noticed before slid open, and they walked into a huge room with towering shelves. It made Keith a little dizzy. “What do you mean?”

“The shock to your systems was significant.” Coran was peering at the Altean labels as they passed. “The reassignment can mimic a seizure, and even Alteans would need a varga or two to recover. But you all were fully functioning almost immediately. Down here.” The shelf he led them down was full of the little plastic blocks, all faintly glowing different colours. “Except Lance, that is. I suspect he has a high degree of interoception and so is more sensitive to physical changes. And the boy has a remarkable ability to bounce back after a hit.”

“Yeah,” Keith said absently. He took in the endless shelves. “How much do you have down here?”

Coran put down the box and grabbed a handful of data sticks. “This section is all medical, so it’s quite extensive. Over there is engineering, behind us is history, and to our left is arts and culture.” His voice became wistful. “Other species have their own databases of Altea, but none as complete as this.”

Keith watched him, then turned back to the towers. “It’s beautiful.”

“It is a marvel.” Coran shook himself. “Alright, back to the job at hand. Here, you take this half.” He showed Keith how to remove the empty data sticks from the slots and replace them with the glowing, full ones, matching the colour of the stick to the colour of the slot.

Keith struggled immediately. The subtler hues escaped him, and he longed for Lance’s sharp eyes. That line of thought served only to sour his mood, something Coran picked up on. He soon had Keith sort the data sticks into broad colour groups instead, which Coran could then decipher into individual shades.

“Are you sure we were put back together correctly?” Keith grumbled.

“Quite sure,” Coran said. “The scans didn’t pick up any residual overlap. Although.” Coran smoothed down his moustache in thought. “If you gained enough visceral memories through the host body, it might read as an outside influence. Unfortunately, we don’t have the time to experiment.”

Keith squinted at a data stick. Was it dark red or dark purple? “What kind of visceral memories?”

“Any kind of shock or trauma,” Coran said. He looked at the stick Keith was holding and pointed to the red pile. “Even strong reactions to otherwise harmless stimuli. Sounds, tastes, smells—”

The data stick clattered to the floor. “Sorry, sorry,” Keith said. “It slipped and—god, I hope I haven’t broken it.”

“Nothing to fret over, son,” Coran said. He knelt beside Keith to examine the stick. “No harm done.” He tossed it into the red pile. “Is everything alright?”

Keith rubbed his face. “I got a lot of emotional overload from the switch. I’m still processing it.”

“Ah.” Coran shifted to sit cross-legged on the floor and took over sorting the data sticks. “Lance can be rather exuberant in expressing himself.”

“He was just...so much,” Keith said. It hardly encompassed all that had happened.

“Would you say he holds his heart in your hands?”

Keith jerked around. “What?”

“No, sleeve, that’s it. He holds his heart on his sleeve.” Coran continued, unaware of Keith’s reaction. “I’d love to create a database of Earth sayings. They really are unusual. Rarely do they come close to what one would assume to be the literal meaning. Earth languages are all very convoluted, aren’t they? How do you go around without constantly misunderstanding each other?”

“I really don’t know,” Keith said.

“It must take a lot of effort to communicate. Especially the difficult concepts.”

Keith glanced at him and knew who had taught Allura her poker face. Despite the inanity of his comments, Coran meant more than he said.

“Yeah,” Keith murmured. “A lot of stuff gets lost.”

Coran tugged at his moustache for a moment before sweeping the scattered data sticks to the side. “Tell you what, my boy. I’ll show you something in here that I think you’ll really enjoy.”

“Oh yeah?” Curiosity piqued, he followed Coran through the endless shelves. The sticks here were clunky, more like bricks than the slim ones they were sorting before.

“These are the prototypes for the paladin bayards,” Coran said. “One form only, but the dissolution technology is the same. Here, try this one out.” He handed Keith a green block.

Keith activated it and a scimitar appeared in his hands. He gave it a few swings, noting that while the grip was a little large, the balance was perfect. “You guys have a whole weapon locker down here?”

“If a library can be considered a weapon,” Coran said. “Which some cultures do, so then yes.” He pulled out a yellow block that turned into a bladed whip. He snapped it out and retracted it with a surprising amount of skill. “It’s good to dust off the relics occasionally.”

They had gone through ancient Altean blades, bows, even a trident, when Keith asked, “Any rifles?” At Coran’s look, he added, “You know, just thinking of what Shiro said about versatility. Maybe I could train with it. If it’s too delicate, I won’t. We can leave it here—”

“That’s an excellent idea,” Coran said. He held up a red block. “The old VDU-84. Sturdy, powerful, and with an adjustable scope for long-range shooting. Simple enough for anyone to pick up and use, efficient enough to please even the experts. Give it a go,” he said with a wink.

Coran shooed Keith out of the archives, telling him to bring the block to the bridge when he was finished. “No need having you get lost in there for three quintants! Believe me, it’s happened.”

Keith rolled the small block around in his hand. “Thanks, Coran. For, you know, all of this.”

“Anytime, my boy. It does an old Altean like me proud to see you all rise to the challenges the universe throws at you. I’m happy to have simply witnessed it.”

Keith rolled his eyes to cover the warmth creeping up his face. “We keep you awake at night, you mean.”

Coran laughed and clapped Keith on the back. “That too.”

&&&

“Blue, my baby, my sweetheart, my darling, it is good to be back,” Lance said as he slid into the pilot’s seat. “I’m here to make sure Keith didn’t mess you up too much.” He ignored her laughter as he looked over the controls.

Having Blue fully back in his head was comforting. She wrapped around him like a worn blanket and eased little stresses Lance hadn’t even noticed. He couldn’t feel Red at all anymore, something he briefly mourned. Then Blue had shifted, and the echo of Red came through her connection with Lance. Red felt impatient and bored, and Lance said he’d get Keith to take her out soon. Seemed like all the lions were glad to have their pilots back, however amusing they found the body switch.

“What was it like having Keith fly you?” Lance said once he finished his inspection. “He had a bit of a stumbling block during the dogfight.”

The burbling stream of Blue appeared. The shadow of Keith lingered at the edge, barely dipping his toe in. A creeping emptiness— _danger, enemies, fight_ —surrounded them and shrank like an aperture. Keith’s shadow was pushed to the edge, desperate to remain on the shore, when it turned and flung itself into the deepest part of the spring.

Lance snorted. “Of course it would take a life-or-death situation for him to open up. Maybe I need to dangle him over a cliff or something.”

Blue’s answer had a thread of concern. “Nah, don’t worry about it, I’m fine.” He drummed on the arm of the seat. “Okay, not really, but you know. It was a weird few days.” He stopped drumming and sat up straight. “We have no secrets between us, right? Because I let you in my head and you know everything that’s going on in there.” He twirled a dial he was ninety percent sure did nothing. “He let you in. What was he like?”

Blue turned her full regard on Lance. It was like being examined by a mountain. Lance was used to it now, but it took a strength of mind not to be overwhelmed. The white rapids of Blue were replaced by Red’s hot spring and Keith’s shadow. The heat sank into Lance’s muscles, loosening knots in his shoulders. But then the hot spring cooled, and a thin film of ice coated the water’s surface. The crystallization was beautiful and fragile.

“Yeah, I get that.” Lance rubbed his chest. Keith couldn’t be pushed into anything. Yesterday was evidence of that enough. He would either freeze up or lash out. Lance couldn’t go that route again.

_Should I do anything at all?_ Even as he thought it, Lance knew it wasn’t an option. He wasn’t sure how he’d survived with his own heart dragging him down like this all the time. It was exhausting. There was no way he could leave Keith with the same fatigue.

“What do you think, my dear? Any advice from a millennia-old psychic mech?”

Her reply was a mix of headbutt-from-a-tiger affection and older-sister-who-knows-too-much teasing.

“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered. “I know, I’m hopeless. I’ve already fallen off the cliff, might as well learn to fly on the way down.”

Images flickered through Lance’s mind. Bright neon black, non-Euclidean geometry, and folded time collided together. “Slow down, Blue,” Lance said. “My squishy little brain can’t take your big words.”

She huffed in frustration—maybe Lance was rubbing off on her, too—and tried to simplify her language enough for Lance to understand. It didn’t work. Whatever she was trying to convey was too big to be broken down into simple pictographs. She finally gave up and turned her attention to Red, who gave an answer in her typically blunt, over-dramatic manner, relayed by Blue. It was an image of Keith’s shadow, Lance’s bayard, and a feeling of _urgent, now, go._

“He’s on the training deck. Of course.”

&&&

Keith was practising with a rifle. _Where the hell did he get a rifle?_ It had a chunkier stock and a harder kickback, but Keith was adapting to it well. The idiot couldn’t stand back to take down his targets though. No, he was rushing up and slamming the stock into the droids’ faces before shooting them.

“You’re still dipping the barrel,” Lance called from the sidelines.

Keith whipped his head around, then had to dodge a swipe from the gladiator. He danced back far enough to take aim—and let out a measured breath—and fire. The gladiator dropped to the ground.

“What do you want?” Keith said, not entirely unfriendly.

“Red told me you were here.” Lance walked forward. “Well, Red told Blue, who told me you were here.”

Keith’s brow furrowed. “Why would she do that?”

“I don’t know, she’s your giant robot cat.” He leaned against the program control panel and looked Keith up and down. “Everyone else is acting like they’re recovering from the flu, and you’re here working up a sweat.”

Keith looked down with a half-smile. “Yeah, well. I wanted to see if I actually remembered any of it.” He waved the rifle.

Intrigued, Lance asked, “And did you?”

In response, Keith swung the rifle up into a shooting stance, aiming straight at Lance. Lance didn’t flinch.

“Not bad, not bad,” he said. He walked in a wide circle around Keith. “Still have that stiffness in your shoulders, but otherwise pretty good.”

Keith lowered the rifle. “I know.” He bunched his shoulders up and consciously relaxed them. “I’m working on it.”

Lance had come around to the control panel again. “Good. Here’s a stress test,” he said and hit a button.

Two dozen gladiators no higher than Keith’s knees appeared around him. “What the—Lance!”

Lance cackled as Keith tried to dodge the swarming droids without tripping over them. He took out a few, but then had to resort to kicking them away to make space. A petty part of Lance felt better at seeing the conquering hero have to coordinate high-stepping and shooting.

Keith finally took out at the last one with a vicious kick, launching it high into the air, where it smacked into the wall and disappeared. “What the hell was that about?” Keith growled.

“Shippettes,” Lance said. “Small but many. We don’t want a repeat of the other day.”

“We weren’t that bad,” Keith muttered.

Lance gave him a look that told Keith what he thought of that opinion.

Keith rolled his eyes. “Okay, fine, I see your point.” He hadn’t met Lance’s gaze since he walked in. Keith looked around the room and said, “So, are you here to train or...?”

“Or?” prompted Lance.

Keith stared at a spot to the left of Lance’s shoes. A muscle under his eye was twitching. “Or nothing.”

Lance slumped against the control board. “I don’t know, man. Red made it sound like you were in distress or something and I thought—well, it doesn’t matter what I thought. I’ll get out of here.” He turned to leave when the unthinkable happened.

“Wait.”

&&&

Keith didn’t know what he was doing, but he usually didn’t. “Wait,” he said again. “I—don’t go.”

“That’s usually what ‘wait’ means,” Lance said. He’d paused, still turned to the door. The jerk could never make this easy.

Keith swallowed. He pulled up memories of the past few days, of being in Lance’s body with Lance’s instincts, and said the first thing that came to mind. “You never answered my question.”

Lance tilted his head. He rotated slowly to face Keith, and Keith knew he had caught him, for a little while at least.

“From yesterday,” Keith continued. “You never said what you wanted from me.”

Maybe Lance also remembered what it was like to be Keith. He drew out a long silence where Keith wasn’t sure if Lance would answer at all. But then: “Pretty sure I did.”

“No.” Keith deactivated the rifle and saw Lance eye the small block with interest. “You talked around the answer—and the question, as a matter of fact—without ever coming out and saying it.”

“I said I wanted you to trust me.”

Keith shook his head. “No. No, that wouldn’t have required all that sniffing and, and, and poking.” He jabbed Lance in the chest and felt a sting of satisfaction at Lance’s startled look. Finally, Keith had put him on the back foot. “If you want me to trust you, start by being honest.” A storm was brewing in Lance’s expression, so he added, “Please. I need you to say it.”

Lance eyed him, and Keith wasn’t sure what he was looking for. He thought he would break under the scrutiny.

“I like you,” Lance finally said, and it was both the heaviest and lightest thing to hear. Heavy because _this wasn’t supposed to happen,_ light because _finally, of course, at last._

Lance kept talking, the words coming out in a rush. “I kinda realized it when I kept getting your emotions about feeling left out and I wanted to help. And I realized it was a little more than friendly camaraderie. Then I would see you in my body reacting to me in your body, and I could put a name to it. I knew it had been sitting there for a while, but I didn’t want to say anything because it’s super weird to want to kiss my own face, plus I wanted to be sure it _was_ me and not just your brain influencing me.” He sighed, having run out of steam, and Keith stared, barely breathing.

Taking a step back, Lance said. “I’m not pressuring you or anything. I want you to be okay with it and not be all...this.” He fluttered a hand at Keith’s tense posture and clenched fists. “So, when that happens, and you decide what to do, come find me.”

He turned again, and Keith’s hand shot out to grab his wrist. “You wanted to kiss me?”

Lance blinked with wide eyes. Keith had clearly surprised him. “Oh, yeah. Often and repeatedly. On the mouth,” he added for clarification.

They stood in a frozen tableau, each waiting for the other to have the world make sense again.

“Oh. Okay. Well.” Keith cleared his throat. “Okay.”

A pause. “Okay what?”

Keith scowled. “Okay, you can—you can kiss me,” he said with gritted teeth.

“Wow, you sure know how to make a guy feel wanted.” Lance had a lop-sided smile as Keith’s scowl deepened.

“I wasn’t even aware of this until two days ago, so give me a break.”

“Really?” Lance stepped closer like Keith was a shy cat. “Not even an inkling?”

Keith crossed his arms, regretting that he asked Lance to stay. “I don’t have a lot of history with these things.”

Lance looked him up and down, but instead of making fun of him like Keith expected, he said, “Can I try something?”

“Okay?”

Lance gently uncrossed Keith’s arms, then stepped towards him and...hugged him.

Although it wasn’t quite a hug. Lance’s arms looped around Keith’s waist, but he held his upper body back to look at Keith. “What are you doing?” Keith asked.

“I’m making you comfortable,” Lance said. “If this feels fine, then maybe the rest of it will be fine, too. I’m letting you make that choice.”

“This doesn’t feel comfortable.” But Keith didn’t pull away.

Lance only waited. Keith stared at his eyes— _nope, bad idea_ —his mouth— _worse_ —his throat— _terrible_ —so settled on staring at a point over Lance’s left ear. “I don’t know if I can,” he whispered.

Lance closed his eyes. “As long as you need.”

The last three days crashed into Keith. Every interaction Lance and he had, Lance had been reaching out, offering help, advice, friendship. Keith was impulsive in everything else; _why couldn’t he take this risk, too?_

Painfully slowly, Keith drew closer. He knew Lance felt him hesitating, but his sharpshooter held still, until Keith at last closed the gap and kissed him.

It was a simple kiss for a simple declaration. No need for even an exclamation mark.

“See?” Lance said when Keith drew back. “Easy.”

_Yeah, right._ Keith couldn’t help but laugh. It was shaky and uncoordinated, but it made Lance grin wider. Keith could see them together, in a week, in a month, and knew how it would play out.

They wouldn’t date in any obvious sense, but Lance would come to Keith whenever he was excited, or nervous, or upset. He would flop down on Keith’s bed—because Lance only flopped, or sprawled, or draped. He took up the whole room just by existing. Lance would talk to Keith, and Keith would talk back, and there would be kissing. Lots of kissing.

Eventually, Keith would come to Lance. He would become Keith’s go-to person, and they would just fit. Like they always had.

Keith lifted his hand to trace Lance’s cheekbone, then drifted his fingers around to the back of Lance’s neck. He pulled Lance in for another kiss. This one had more heat, more trust, more understanding. Keith’s fingers lingered in Lance’s hair. “It’s getting long,” he muttered.

“You’re giving me hair tips?”

“If you’re giving me friendship tips.”

Lance squeezed tighter, pulling Keith in. “I don’t think I was talking about ‘friendship.’”

Keith’s exhale was shaky. “Yeah.”

Lance dropped his forehead to Keith’s. “You sure you’re okay with this?” he whispered.

In answer, Keith just grabbed Lance’s hand and put it to his chest, where Keith’s heart beat a sure and steady rhythm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Red is all of us.
> 
> Thank you everyone for your comments, bookmarks, and kudos! It means a lot to hear that not only do you enjoy my ramblings, but you look forward to them and it makes your day a little better. And really, isn't that the real treasure? Goodnight, my darlings, and take care.

**Author's Note:**

> Look for me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/alex_caligari) or [Tumblr](http://alexcaligari.tumblr.com/)!


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